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A few months prior to his death our father undertook the preparation of his Autobiography. This was earnestly encouraged by his family, who shared with the public the desire that he should tell the tale of his life in his own words, giving those pictures of his inner self, the impressions made on him by his varying experiences, that he alone could give, and which, to a large extent, he alone knew. Confiding and free-spoken as he was in his joys, in his griefs he withdrew within himself, bearing in patient silence a load of sorrow unknown even to those nearest to him. But it was not to be. He had only jotted down a rough outline of his plan, and written a part of an intermediate chapter, when he laid down his pen for a little rest, never to be resumed again.

In his contract with our publishers but a single volume of not less than six hundred pages was contemplated. Unconscious of its magnitude, we undertook to complete the contract. Accepting the limitations of a single volume, we began to collect the necessary material, and, when too late to change the form of the work, discovered that two volumes would hardly contain the history as it opened up to us, so closely interwoven has his life been with the nation’s history, and so full of important incidents. In the work of condensation, to bring our story within the space prescribed, we found it necessary to omit many of his letters, hoping that in the not far-distant future we might publish a supplemental volume containing all of his important correspondence.

14The book before us we have sought, as far as possible, to make autobiographic, telling the tale in our father’s words; happily the many letters furnished us by friends, or retained in the family, his public writings and utterances, supplemented by the many personal reminiscences which he gave us at various times, has enabled us to do so to a large extent.

We are fully conscious of the imperfect manner in which we have woven these quotations into our story; the ordinary writer who attempts to connect with his words those glowing sentences white-hot with his fiery indignation against slavery, or his eloquent appeal to the English public for fair-dealing, or the brilliant play of wit and fancy in his more humorous utterances, can hope, at the most, to give but a respectable background that may aid by contrast.

We have sought to make this book a truthful history from the beginnings of his life, through boyhood, manhood, and ripened age, to the end, omitting no important period, though passing innumerable incidents.

A man loving peace, he reached peace only through war. From his early manhood he was called to meet in deadly combat the great sins of the nation. Through his life, at different times, he met and overcame bitter and deadly assaults made upon him.

In our narration of these events we have had no revenge to gratify nor theory to maintain. We have tried to give only facts, omitting deductions or conclusions, leaving each reader to draw his own inferences. If parts of our narrative bear hardly on any, it is only the pressure of the facts which cannot be suppressed in any fearless, truthful portrayal of our father’s life. We do not make them; we merely state them.

We would acknowledge our indebtedness to the many friends who have kindly furnished letters and reminiscences, but especially to our mother, whose memory, running back along the paths they travelled for so many years together, 15has given to us much that never would otherwise have been known.

If our readers get from a perusal of these pages a tithe of the comfort and inspiration which we have obtained from their preparation, we shall feel that our work has not been in vain.

If they can see something of the fearlessness for right, the patience under unjust suffering, the inextinguishable love for fellow-men, and the abiding faith in God, that has been revealed by a study of his life even to us, who knew him best, we shall be satisfied.

Brooklyn, March 12, 1888.

Ancestry—Beecher—Ward—Foote—The Anvil—The Oak—Courtship and Marriage of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote—Home at East Hampton, Long Island—Removal to Litchfield, Connecticut.

Henry Ward Beecher used to say that the first thing for a man to do, if he would succeed in life, is to “choose a good father and mother to be born of.” He himself was eminently wise, or fortunate, as the case may be, in this matter.

“My earthly life,” he says, “was given me by two of the best folks that ever lived on earth.” His father, Lyman Beecher, was one of the leading preachers, reformers, and controversialists of his day. Sturdy in body and mind, full of sensibility, aflame with enthusiasm, devoted to the highest aims and utterly unselfish in life, a Christian in whom deep spirituality and strong common sense were happily blended, he was just the man to transmit excellent qualities to his children; a father to be enjoyed while living, and to be remembered with love and reverence after his death.

Of him his son says: “While he was eloquent and among the foremost speakers of his day, I remember particularly that I never heard from him a word of uncharitableness, nor saw a symptom of envy or jealousy, or aught else but the most enthusiastic love of men, and of young men and young ministers; and knowing him in the household, I have yet to know another person that was so devoid of the inferior feelings and so eminent in the topmost feelings of human nature.”

Lyman’s father’s name was David, a well-read, clear-headed man, with decided opinions upon the questions of the day; one with whom Roger Sherman delighted, upon his return from Congress, to talk over the business of the session and discuss public affairs. He kept college students as boarders, that he might enjoy their conversation, and made himself proficient in many of their studies. Of him his son said: “If he had received a regular education he would have been equal to anybody.” He was 18both blacksmith and farmer, and had the reputation of “raising the nicest rye and making the best hoes in New England.”

The Anvil and Oak Stump.

Lyman Beecher’s mother was a Lyman, a woman “of a joyous, sparkling, hopeful temperament.” Her grandfather was a Scotchman, thus giving a little Gaelic blood to the veins of her descendants. In his autobiography Lyman Beecher says: “She died of consumption two days after I was born. I was a seven-months child, and when the woman that attended on her saw what a puny thing I was, and that the mother could not live, she thought it useless to attempt to keep me alive. I was actually wrapped up and laid aside. But after a while one of the women thought she would look and see if I were living, and, finding I was, concluded to wash and dress me, saying: ‘It’s a pity he hadn’t died with his mother.’ So you see it was but by a hair’s-breadth I got a foothold in this world.” He was taken in charge by “Aunt Benton” and brought up on his uncle Lot Benton’s farm in North Guilford, where farm-work and farm-fare made him strong.

Their intention was to make a farmer of him; but the intolerable slowness of an ox-team, in ploughing fifteen acres of summer 19fallow three times over in a single season, so disgusted the lad that he became restless. His uncle saw it, and upon consultation with the father they decided to send him to school to prepare for Yale College, which was accordingly done. He often said, “Oxen sent me to college.”

David’s father’s name was Nathaniel. He was also a blacksmith, and the anvil of both father and son stood upon the stump of that old oak under which John Davenport preached his first sermon to the New Haven Colony. He married a Sperry, “a pious woman,” whose mother was a Roberts from Forlallt, Cardiganshire, Wales. From her, his great great-grandmother, came the fervid Welsh blood with which Henry Ward was always so well pleased.

Joseph was the father of Nathaniel. His father’s name was John, of whom tradition says that he was one of those who in the fall of 1637 accompanied Samuel Eaton in his explorations for a suitable location for the colony of John Davenport, that had just come over and was then staying at Boston; and that he was one of the very few men who lived through the winter in the poor hut that had been built at “Quinnipiack,” New Haven, that they might pre-empt the territory and be in readiness to welcome the colony in the following spring.

He was the only son of Hannah Beecher, whose husband, born in Kent, England, died just before the colony sailed. She was about to abandon the enterprise, but, being a midwife and likely to be of service to the youthful colony, they promised her her husband’s share in the town plot if she would come. They kept their word, and it was in her lot that the historic oak just mentioned stood.

Her business seems not to have been remarkably lucrative, for at her death her estate inventoried only £55 5s. 6d.

One earlier mention of the family was found by Mr. Beecher in the British Museum during his visit to England in 1863, and copied in his diary:

“Visitation of Kent, 16,279 Brit. Museum.

“Henry Beecher, alderman and sheriff of London 1570, ob’t 1571.”

Apparently of more than the average intellectual ability of their class, there was one feature in which the men whom we have described markedly excelled—namely, in their physical strength. 20The standard of measurement was peculiar to those early times, and may not be as well understood by us; yet it even now conveys the idea of great stalwartness. David, it was said, could lift a barrel of cider and carry it into the cellar; Nathaniel, his father, was not quite as strong, yet he could throw a barrel of cider into a cart; while Joseph exceeded them all, for he could lift the barrel and drink out of the bung-hole. Of Henry, the sheriff, no description has been found.

There was one especial feature of degeneracy in these modern days, compared with the good old times of the fathers, over which Henry Ward, when Mrs. Beecher was just within earshot, moaned and groaned. His grandfather, he said, had five wives, his father had three, but such was the meagreness of these penurious times in which he lived, and the persistence of the Bullard blood, that he saw no chance for himself to have more than one. But afterwards, lest she should feel hurt at his raillery, he writes her with many expressions of affection, in a letter dated March 31, 1872: “It“It has always been a shadow over the future to fear that I should walk alone the few remaining years of my life, for alone I shall be if you go from me. In jest we have often spoken of other connections. But such a thing is the remotest of possibilities. Should you go no one would ever take your place.”

Such was the ancestry selected on the father’s side. Six generations, without question, are known to us, reaching from the hills of Litchfield, in Connecticut, to the chalk-cliffs of Kent, England. For that distance we can trace the family stream up to its sources in the great body of the English common people, in that county most characteristic of England, where the Roman had first struggled with the Briton, where the “free-necked men,” under Hengist and Horsa, had first made a lodgment on English soil, and near which was Hastings and the fields of the Norman conquest, and where, perhaps more than in any other county, mingled those different strains of blood, Briton, Roman, Saxon, Northmen, Scots, and Picts, out of which has come England’s strength and England’s greatness. We find all of them of the yeomanry, all of them honest, useful, God-fearing men, fit to be the progenitors of one who delighted in nothing more than in his common experiences with common people, and valued nothing more highly than their confidence and friendship.

21Nor would it be difficult to find in the sturdy independence and quaint humor of these men of the anvil and the plough, the origin of much of that robust and humorous manliness which made Henry Ward Beecher so conspicuous in his day and generation.

His power to strike heavy blows and to hit the nail on the head was partly inherited, and that anvil-ring of the fathers has been often heard in these latter days under his sledge-hammer strokes. If the iron were not hot, he heated it by striking, and sparks flew, and men’s hearts and minds were moulded and welded before he was done.

More than this, there appears in him something of the love of the “shield-game” and the “sword-play” of those earlier generations that were “at heart fighters,” and something also of the sadness and heroism which led them to say, “Each man of us shall abide the end of his life-work; let him that may, work his doomed deeds ere death come.”

On the mother’s side the selection was somewhat different. While we find no more sterling qualities, there is in this line a higher social position, more culture, a broader training in public affairs, both civil and military, and what with some may appear of still greater importance, a coat-of-arms given as a special mark of royal gratitude.

Roxana Foote had gentle blood in her veins. She could trace her genealogy on the father’s side back through Nathaniel Foote, who came into Connecticut with Hooker’s company in 1636, to James Foote, an officer in the English army, who aided King Charles to conceal himself in the “Royal Oak” and was knighted for his loyalty. As the old primer has it:

The tree stood in a field of clover, and the Foote coat-of-arms still bears an oak for its crest and a clover-leaf in its quarterings, with the motto “Loyalty and Truth.”

Her mother, Roxana Ward Foote, was descended from Andrew Ward, who came over with Sir Richard Saltonstall and settled in Watertown, Mass., in 1630.

He afterwards moved to Wethersfield, and was a member of the first General Court, or Legislature, held at Hartford in 1636. Later he moved to Stamford, and represented that colony in the higher branch of the General Court at New Haven.

From him descended Colonel Andrew Ward, who took part in the old French and Indian war and aided in the capture of Louisburg in 1745. Of him it is told that, being a stanch cold-water man, he took money in lieu of his daily rations of grog. With this he bought six silver spoons, on which he had engraved the name “Louisburg.” Some of these spoons are still preserved in the family, witnesses to the virtue and valor of one of its honored ancestors.

His son was General Andrew Ward, of Revolutionary fame, who, at the close of the war, went back to his native town, Guilford, and took up his residence upon a farm of about two hundred acres, called Nutplains. For many years he represented the town in the State Legislature, being nominated, it is said, year after year by some one of the town worthies in this primitive manner: “The meeting is now open, and you will proceed to vote for General Ward and Deacon Burgess for representatives.”

When his daughter, an only child, who had married Eli Foote, was left a widow, he took her with her ten children to his home at Nutplains, and cared for them as if they were his own. Being a great reader, and always bringing home with him from the Legislature his saddle-bags full of books, which were read aloud and discussed in the family, this home became a school that afforded superior advantages for gaining acquaintance with literature, for acquiring such knowledge of science as was accessible at that time, and for exciting thought and interest. In that school Roxana, the second-born of the family, is represented to have been easily first both in intellect and goodness.

Taking her part in the labor of the household at a time when 23it was expected that the woman portion would not only care for the house, prepare the food, and make the clothes for all the family, but also weave and spin the materials as well, she yet managed to acquire an education of which graduates of our modern schools and colleges might well be proud. “She studied while she spun flax, tying her books to the distaff.” She not only became well read in literature and history, and acquainted with the progress of science, then just beginning to attract the attention of scholars, but learned to write and speak the French language fluently. She gave enough attention to music to be able to accompany her voice on the guitar, and was sufficiently skilled in the use of pencil and brush to paint some very creditable portraits upon ivory, several of which are still in the family. She was an adept in the mysteries of the needle, “in fine embroidery with every variety of lace and cobweb stitch,” and was gifted with great skill and celerity in all manner of handicraft, so that in after-years “neither mantua-maker, tailoress, or milliner ever drew on the family treasury.”

Belonging to a family distinguished in both branches of her ancestry, and residing, while her father lived, in the centre of the village of Guilford, which could boast that more than four-fifths of its original population belonged to families with coats-of-arms in Great Britain, and afterwards taken to the home of her grandfather, General Ward, who was the foremost man of the town and one of the leading men in the State, and who kept open house to all strangers, she enjoyed the best social advantages which the times afforded.

Tall and beautiful in form and feature, with a winning and yet commanding presence, “she was so sensitive and of so great natural timidity that she never spoke in company or before strangers without blushing, and was absolutely unable in after-life to conform to the standard of what was expected of a pastor’s wife and lead the devotions in the weekly female prayer-meeting.”

She was early confirmed in the Episcopal Church; her parents, although both from strictly Puritan families, having joined that denomination upon their marriage. They had held through all the Revolutionary struggle to their loyalty to King George, and this had subjected them to the determined opposition of their neighbors, and stamped the family, perhaps, with something of that independence of character which opposition to a prevailing 24popular sentiment is adapted to give, and which is so marked a feature in her descendants.

Converted when she was but five years old, and scarcely remembering the time when she did not go with her joys and sorrows to God in prayer, and next to the oldest in a family of ten children, her mother a widow, and all dependent upon the grandfather, she early learned that patience, self-control, efficiency, and unselfishness that characterized her through life and left in her old home at Nutplains, as Mrs. Stowe tells us, traditions like these: “Your mother never spoke an angry word in her life.” “Your mother never told a lie.” And from the husband such a testimony as this: “She experienced resignation, if any one ever did. I never saw the like, so entire, without reservation or shadow of turning. In no exigency was she taken by surprise. She was just there, quiet as an angel from above. I never heard a murmur; and if ever there was a perfect mind as respects submission, it was hers. I never witnessed a movement of the least degree of selfishness; and if there ever was any such thing in the world as disinterestedness, she had it.”

No one reading her history will think that Henry Ward exaggerated when, speaking of her and her influence upon him, he said: “There are few born into this world that are her equals. She was a woman of extraordinary graces and gifts; a woman not demonstrative, with a profound philosophical nature, of a wonderful depth of affection, and with a serenity that was simply charming. From her I received my love of the beautiful, my poetic temperament; from her also I received simplicity and childlike faith in God.”

And again: “My communion with nature arose from the mother in me. Because my mother was an inspired woman, who saw God in nature as really as in the Book, and she bestowed that temperament upon me, and I came gradually to feel that, aside from God as revealed in the past, there was a God with an everlasting present around about me.”

With these elements of a more personal nature also appear certain family traits. As we saw how, from the father’s side, the old anvil was constantly making itself heard in the strong, sturdy qualities of the Beecher stock, so shall we see features from the ancestry on the mother’s side coming to him almost unchanged. The loyalty represented by the oak-tree, and the virtue displayed 25at Louisburg, will constantly show themselves. Who that has seen him standing, now for the black man in the face of the adverse popular sentiment of his time in obedience to his own convictions of right, now governing his political actions by the same authority, and anon following his religious convictions wherever they led him, can have failed to see, in him, the oak-tree standing in the clover-field with the motto written upon its shield, in letters of light, “Loyalty and Truth”? In his constant advocacy of reform, in his early and strenuous opposition to intemperance, appears “Louisburg” again, written this time, not upon silver, but upon life and character—the Ward and the Foote families showing in him the characteristics they had won.

More than this, probably no lines could better illustrate the New England race-elements, the union of its democracy and its gentry, the sturdy independence of its homes and its native ability in war and peace, its intellectual and its spiritual independence, its quaint humor and its shrewd common sense, than those that united in him from both the parental roots.

He was a natural product of the New England stock, tempered and sweetened by the broader traditions of the more aristocratic blood of the Cavalier, of New England institutions and New England character. And since New England, thus enriched, illustrates the whole land, and by reason of the diffusion of her blood has made her characteristics national, he was a typical American, standing with unusual ability and conscientiousness where every true American feels that he ought to stand—for right and liberty. This, we doubt not, was in part the ground of his national popularity and influence; he was felt to be so thoroughly American. He represented us as do our national colors and our battle-flags, and we were proud of him, grew enthusiastic over him, and men that never saw him loved him. And since these characteristics are but the product of English institutions and the putting forth of Anglo-Saxon tendencies which were always advancing, always protesting against some old abuse, and always seeking the recognition of some right—now at Runnymede among the barons, and now at Westminster among the Commons; now taking up the question of negro-slavery, and now the Irish question; always hopeful, expectant, progressive—and America is but, as he claimed, “the better England transplanted,” and he but “an Englishman from a broader 26England,” a continental instead of an insular one, he was hailed by all the English-speaking people as belonging to them as do King Alfred and Shakspere.

As we go on we shall find many other influences at work—influences of nature, of books, of college and profession; but thus early we can see that, more than of any and all the rest, Henry Ward Beecher was the product of New England parentage, full-veined with English traditions and race characteristics.

The courtship of Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote took place in 1798. It was marked by the interpenetration of religious sentiment and earthly love, and was a true preparation for home-making, and of such a home as should help to form the remarkable personality of H. W. Beecher.

The letters that passed between them during this year give evidence of the strong love of those who, while having still upon them the dew of their youth, have each found in the other the chosen mate—a love than which earth has no more influential nor beautiful thing to give. They also show us the two akin in intellectual powers and pursuits, and equally enjoying the treasures which the world of letters opened to them. But most prominent of all matters referred to in these letters are religious questions and personal religious experiences. They revolve around “the evidences” and similar subjects with an absorption of interest that must seem almost incomprehensible to modern lovers. In the perfect and unrestrained communion of heart with heart these two speak of the sweet and wonderful experiences that they have enjoyed from the presence of the Lord, share their common hopes and anticipations of the coming glory of the Redeemer’s kingdom, and strive to help one another to a better understanding of the best things of God. Such thoughts and efforts as these undoubtedly went far toward laying the foundation of that “intimacy that existed throughout the whole range of their being,” and for that deep and unswerving regard and confidence which each cherished for the other until death. She rested upon him, and he always looked upon her as intellectually and morally the stronger and better portion of himself. The very differences in their nature and education contributed to this large and beautiful unity and confidence. While resembling each other in many things, in others they were the complements of each other. He was quick and impulsive, she, 27perfectly serene and self-poised. He was logical, she was intuitive as well. He was of the Independents, she was an Episcopalian. From such a union, so sincere and broad, we may expect a happy home.

Judging from these letters, we should say also that whenever these two shall build their home they will build it strong and high. Not only will love be there, with all its attractions, and intellect with its stimulus and power, but the grand things of heaven will be builded into it. And wherever it shall be established, whether by the sea-shore at East Hampton or among the hills of Litchfield, it will have a broad horizon; it will look out upon something wider and deeper than the sea and higher than the mountains. The high things of God will always be kept in view; His broad, deep, measureless purposes will be held within the range of its contemplation, and His presence will be felt in shaping its policy and in giving vitality to its atmosphere.

From such a home we shall expect children that shall have power in the world.

They were married at Nutplains, September 19, 1799.

“Roxana’s friends were all present and all my folks from New Haven.” ... “Nobody ever married more heart and hand than we.” Then came the packing up; “the candle-stand, bureau, clothing, bedding, linen, and stuffs generally,” and the going over by sloop to Long Island.

Their life in East Hampton, Long Island, was that of two who believed, without one shadow of doubt, in their call of God, and who took up their work, not only with the firm grasp of duty, but with the enthusiasm of devout, self-sacrificing love. Their faith was tested by his long-continued sickness, by the death of one of their children, and by the numerous discouragements of a country minister; but it stood the test, deepening and brightening under trial.

It was a barren place to which they had come, but Lyman Beecher brought such vigorous faith and added to it such enthusiastic labors, now in the home church, now in the school-houses of the surrounding districts, and now among the Indians at Montauk Point, that he made the whole district fruitful. The field was a narrow one, but by the interest awakened by his sermons, especially the one upon duelling called forth by the 28death of Alexander Hamilton from the pistol of Aaron Burr, he broadened it until his parish stretched across the Atlantic.

Church in which Rev. Lyman Beecher preached, in East Hampton, L. I.

The wants of a young family made some effort necessary to eke out the meagre salary of four hundred dollars, and a school for girls was decided upon, to be kept by Mrs. Beecher. It was successful in every respect but financially, and moderately so in 29that; but it did not bring the relief that was sought, and there came a necessity to change for a field where sufficient salary could be had to support the family without the harassments of other and unpastoral labors.

A marked providence, as it seemed to Mr. Beecher, opened the way to his preaching on trial in Litchfield, Connecticut. He made a good impression; the people were unanimous and eager in their call; the Presbytery gave its consent; and now, without a doubt that it is according to the will of God, the decision is made, and the home which had first been planted within the sound of the ocean surf at East Hampton, Long Island, in 1799, was transplanted to the quiet inland village of Litchfield in 1810.

Litchfield—Situation—Natural Features—Early Settlers—Social and Moral Advantages—Patriotism—North Street Described—The Beecher Home—Birth of Henry Ward—The Times at Home and Abroad—His Birth-Mark.

As Henry Ward was perfectly satisfied with the parents that bore him, so he was with the place in which he was born. “Surely old Litchfield,” he says, “was a blessed place for one’s birth and childhood. Although there were no mountains, there were hills, the oldest-born of mountains, high, round, and innumerable. Great trees there were, full of confidences with the wind that chastised them in winter and kissed and caressed them all the summer.”

The hills referred to were “Prospect” and “Mount Tom” on the west, “Chestnut Hill” on the east, and others like them but unnamed—the “high, round, and innumerable” ones of which he speaks, and which together formed, with their sloping sides and valleys between, that broad and irregular plateau of elevated land, extending for miles on either side, in the midst of which the village of Litchfield is situated. A country of hills, with that wide and picturesque horizon which only such a landscape can furnish, where the irregular outline appears as walls and watch-towers for the protection of the home territory, with here and there an open door, through which the imagination of youth or the feet of maturer years may pass out into the great world of sunshine or of cloud beyond.

Litchfield Hill itself, on which the village stands, is more than a thousand feet above sea-level, “high and broad-backed,” and belongs, with all its fellows, to the Green Mountain range, which, beginning near the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sweeps in an irregular curve to the seaboard at Long Island Sound, the back-bone of this great New England peninsula.

High enough to be breezy and healthy, but not so high as to be unfertile, and sloping to the south, it afforded then, as now, all 31the inducements for residence which sun, soil, pure air, and a beautiful landscape could furnish.

Lakes, without which no landscape is perfect, were added: Little Pond to the southwest, and Big Bantam Lake beyond, were the ones that were visible from the village, out of a large number that can be found in the township; but the Sawmill Pond, where Henry Ward caught his first fish, with an alder-stick for a pole and a bent pin for a hook—caught it so thoroughly that it was dashed in pieces upon the rocks behind him—has disappeared with the tearing away of the dam that held it.

Brooks ran down between the hills and sang their way through the meadows, each one offering some new feature to the landscape, and each a field of new discovery for inquisitive youth.

Woods, made up of every variety of tree and shrub native to our latitude, where nuts grew and all kinds of small game abounded, where crows and now and then a hen-hawk built their nests, were in easy reach upon the slopes of the hills both to the west and east. Ledges of rock to the north were the lair of wildcats, a vermin so numerous seventy-five years ago as to be a serious pest to the farmers; and stone walls, where woodchucks retreated from the clover-fields and thought themselves safe, were the usual division-fences for the fields.

There were other things that were equally pleasing to a boy’s fancy, and perhaps equally influential in his education. The lakes, streams, and forests of the town had been the favorite fishing and hunting ground of the Indians; arrow-heads were occasionally picked up on the lake shore or turned up by the ploughshare upon the hillside; and, best of all, Mount Tom was one of the series of stations where blazed the signal-fires which the Indians of this region built to warn their brethren of the whole territory between the Housatonic and Naugatuck rivers of the approach of their enemies, the fierce Mohawks.

Litchfield, in short, was the paradise of a birth-place for any boy. It was paradise, school-house, gymnasium, church, and cathedral to Henry Ward Beecher. In it he experienced his sweetest pleasures, learned his best lessons, gained control of his powers, and offered his first worship. He breathed its pure air, climbed its rocks, wandered in its woods, wrestled with its winter storms, and in this way laid the foundation for that superb health for which he was remarkable through life.

32With the hunger and inquisitiveness of a growing boy, he searched nature’s storehouse of fruits and nuts, which opens with the wintergreen plums and squaw-berries of the melting snow-time of spring, and continues, a house of plenty for all that know her secrets—partridges, squirrels, and boys—until the snow covers the ground in December, and so gained that habit of investigation into the things of nature, and of close observation, that distinguished him ever after.

He lay on the ground and looked up into the blue sky and the moving tree-tops for hours together, and listened to the voices of spring-time and eventide, and in this way, as he tells us, received the first distinct religious impressions that he remembered. His nature, which seemed closed almost to the verge of stupidity to the rules of syntax and the answers in the Westminster Catechism, was wide open and receptive to all the processes and influences of nature around him. He drank them in, and they became not only a vast storehouse of facts and images to which he resorted in after-life for illustrations, but, even more than that, a very part of himself. The tree that so often appeared in his sermons was made from those up whose trunks he had climbed, in whose shade he had lain, and to the whisperings of whose leaves he had listened in boyhood. The spring which so often served in illustrating spiritual truths was but the description of those that burst out from the foot of Chestnut or of Prospect Hill, and the flowers so frequently referred to in the pulpit or in private conversation were such as he had grown familiar with by the roadside, in the meadows or the forests of his country home. The moving of the great cloud-shadows across the fields of Litchfield, the blue of its skies, the reddening of its mornings and the gold of its sunsets, the flash of its sunlight upon the lake, its wealth of apple-blossoms, the exquisite beauty of its violets hidden away in fence-corners, the grace of its elm-branches, the ruggedness of its oaks, the strength of its rocks, the soft catkins of its willows, its meadow flower-garden of clover, daisy, and buttercup, the gorgeousness of its forests in autumn, the gurgle of its brooks, the song of its birds, the plaintive voices of its twilight, the gentle breathings of its August winds and the fierce rattle of its December storms, were all absorbed by his receptive nature and continually reappeared in his writings and talk of after-years. They added the grace and beauty native to them 33to all that he wrote or spoke, and were in part the secret of that charm in his words which attached and interested all alike. They did more than this: they prepared him to be an interpreter of nature to others, and, when he had become equally well equipped with a rich spiritual experience, they fitted him, as we shall see farther on, to be the reconciler of a spiritual faith and a material science.

It was not an unimportant thing, but one of God’s beautiful provisions, that Henry Ward Beecher was born in Litchfield, where there is more of nature to the square foot, as we believe, than in any other place on the globe; to learn his first lessons in the beautiful school of her flowers, birds, brooks, meadows, pasture lands, hill-tops, and forests.

“Dear old Litchfield! I love thee still, even if thou didst me the despite of pushing me into life upon thy high and windy hilltop! Where did the spring ever break forth more joyously and sing at escaping from winter, as the children of Israel did when that woman’s-rights Miriam chanted her song of victory? Where did the torrid summer ever find a lovelier place in which to cool its beams? What trees ever murmured more gently to soft winds, or roared more lion-like when storms were abroad?

“It was there that we learned to fish, to ride a horse alone, to do the barn chores, to cut and split wood, to listen at evening to the croaking frogs and whistling tree-toads, to go to meeting and go to sleep, to tear holes in new clothes; there we learned to hoe, to mow away hay, to weed onions, to stir up ministers’ horses with an unusual speed when ridden to water; there we went a-wandering up and down forest-edges, and along the crooked brooks in flower-pied meadows, dreaming about things not to be found in any catechism.”

Equally marked was Litchfield at that day for its social and moral as for its natural advantages. Its early settlers, mostly from the excellent stock from which the colonies of Hartford and Windsor were formed, were men of broad and liberal mould, and began their work upon this hilltop in a characteristic fashion. They laid out their streets and staked off the village common with such generous breadth that they remain the delight of residents and the admiration of strangers to this day. They made such liberal provision for education and religion that the settlement 34soon became noted for the excellency of its schools and the commanding influence of its pulpit.^[1]

The law-school of Judges Reeve and Gould, and the young ladies’ school of the Misses Pierce, made it an educational centre scarcely second in the breadth of its influence to any in the land, and attracted a class of residents of high social position.

Its courts gathered from time to time some of the leading members of the bar from the whole country, not for a few hours, as now with our railroad facilities, but for days and weeks together. All these things helped to create a very high order of public spirit—that force which, often wholly unregarded, is yet so powerful in moulding the character and giving direction to the life.

One other element in this communal influence must not be omitted—its intense patriotism. From the beginning to the close of the Revolutionary struggle the records of the county of Litchfield are stamped with the evidence of the most enthusiastic loyalty to the cause of the struggling colonies. At the time of the Boston Port Bill, Litchfield had forwarded a liberal contribution for the aid of the poor of that city. When the equestrian statue of King George, of gilded lead, was missing from the Bowling Green in New York, it was shortly found in the dwelling-house of Oliver Wolcott in this village, was melted down by his daughters and their friends, and furnished forty thousand bullets, which were sent to our soldiers in the field, to be afterwards forwarded by them, from the muzzles of their muskets, to the king’s Hessians, with the hissing compliments of the American colonies.

No town excelled her in the proportionate number or quality of the men she sent into the field (at one time every able-bodied man in the town being, it is said, at the front), nor in the suffering and loss which they endured. Thirty out of a company 35of thirty-six who surrendered at Fort Washington, New York, “died miserable deaths from cold, hunger, thirst, suffocation, disease, and the vilest cruelties from those to whom they had surrendered on a solemn promise of honorable treatment.” This had made Ethan Allen, a native of this village, and, as is well known, a professed infidel, grind his teeth and exclaim: “My faith in my creed is shaken; there ought to be a hell for such infernal scoundrels as that Lowrie,” the officer in charge of the prisoners. Nor were these days so remote that their influence was unfelt. In 1810 the spirit of ’76 was not seriously diminished, and many of the principal actors in the stirring scenes of the Revolutionary struggle were still alive. Colonel Tallmadge, one of the most dashing and able cavalry officers of the army, Governor Oliver Wolcott, Jr., a member of Washington’s cabinet, and many other soldiers of the Revolution and actors of less note, were residents of the village at the time of the coming here of Lyman Beecher. When we note the burning patriotism which was always so marked a characteristic of Henry Ward, we must remember that he drank it in in his youth from its primitive sources among the old soldiers of Litchfield.

We give his description of the village as it appeared to him in his childhood, although a part of it is out of chronological order. It is found in an article entitled “Litchfield Revisited,” written in 1856:

“The morning after our arrival in Litchfield we sallied forth alone. The day was high and wide, full of stillness, and serenely radiant. As we carried our present life up the North Street we met at every step our boyhood life coming down. There were the old trees, but looking not so large as to our young eyes. The stately road had, however, been bereaved of the buttonball trees, which had been crippled by disease. But the old elms retained a habit peculiar to Litchfield. There seemed to be a current of wind which at times passes high up in the air over the town, and which moves the tops of the trees, while on the ground there is no movement of wind. How vividly did that sound from above bring back early days, when for hours we lay upon the windless grass and watched the top leaves flutter, and marked how still were the under leaves of the same tree!

“One by one came the old houses. On the corner stood and stands the jail—awful building to young sinners! We never 36passed its grated windows without a salutary chill. The old store, and same old name, Buell, on it; the bank, and its long, lean legs spindling up to hold the shelf up under the roof! The Colonel Tallmadge house, that used to seem so grand that it was cold, but whose cherry-trees in the front yard seemed warm enough and attractive to our longing lips and watery mouths. How well do we remember the stately gait of the venerable colonel of Revolutionary memory! We don’t recollect that he ever spoke to us or greeted us; not because he was austere or unkind, but from a kind of military reserve. We thought him good and polite, but should as soon have thought of climbing the church-steeple as of speaking to one living so high and venerable above all boys!

“Then came Judge Gould’s! Did we not remember that and the faces that used to illuminate it? The polished and polite judge, the sons and daughters, the little office in the yard, the successive classes of law students that received that teaching which has since so often honored both bar and bench. Here, too, we stopped to retrace the very place where, being set on by a fiery young Southern blood, without any cause that we knew of then or can remember now, we undertook to whip one of Judge Gould’s sons, and did not do it. We were never satisfied with the result, and think if the thing could be reviewed now it might turn out differently.

“There, too, stood Dr. Catlin’s house, looking as if the rubs of time had polished it instead of injuring. Next there seemed to our puzzled memory a vacancy. Ought there not to be about there a Holmes house, to which we used to go and get baskets of Virgaloo pears, and were inwardly filled, as a satisfying method of keeping us honest toward the pears in the basket?

“But Dr. Sheldon’s house is all right. Dear old Dr. Sheldon! We began to get well as soon as he came into the house; or, if the evil spirit delayed a little, ‘Cream-o’-tartar with hot water poured upon it and sweetened’ finished the work. He had learned, long before the days of homœopathy, that a doctor’s chief business is to keep parents from giving their children medicine, so that nature may have a fair chance at the disease without having its attention divided or diverted.

“But now we stop before Miss Pierce’s—a name known in thousands of families, where gray-headed mothers remember the 37soft and gentle days of Litchfield schooling. The fine residence is well preserved, and time has been gentle within likewise. But the school-house is gone, and she that for so many years kept it busy is gone, and the throng that have crossed its threshold brood the whole globe with offices of maternal love. The Litchfield Law School in the days of Judge Tapping Reeve and Judge Gould, and Miss Pierce’s Female School, were in their day two very memorable institutions, and, though since supplied by others upon a larger scale, there are few that will have performed so much, if we take into account the earliness of the times and the fact that they were pioneers and parents of those that have supplanted them. But they are gone, the buildings moved off, and the ground smoothed and soft to the foot with green grass. No more shall the setting sun see Litchfield streets thronged with young gentlemen and ladies, and filling the golden air with laughter or low converse which, unlaughing then, made life musical for ever after!

“But where is the Brace house? An old red house—red once, but picked by the winds and washed by rains till the color was neutral, thanks to the elements. The old elm-trees guard the spot, a brotherhood as noble as these eyes have ever seen, lifted high up, and in the part nearest heaven locking their arms together and casting back upon their separate trunks an undivided shade. So are many, separate in root and trunk, united far up by their heaven-touching thoughts and affections.

“Mrs. Lord’s house is the only one now before we reach our own native spot. This, too, holds its own and is fertile in memories. Across the way lived Sheriff Landon, famous for dry wit and strong politics.

“But south of him lived the greatest man in town, Mr. Parker, who owned the stages; and the wittiest man in town, with us boys, was Hiram Barnes, that drove stage for him! To be sure, neither of them was eminent for learning or civil influence, but, in that temple which boys’ imaginations make, a stage proprietor and a stage-driver stand forth as grand as Minerva in the Parthenon!

“But there are houses on the other side. The eastern side of Litchfield North Street, like the eastern side of Broadway, was never so acceptable to fashion, albeit some memorable names lived there. It was our good fortune to be born on the 38west side of the street. We know not what blessings must have descended upon us from having been born on the fashionable side; one shudders to think how near he escaped being born on the other, the east side of the street.”

Into this village Lyman Beecher brought his family in 1810. The dwelling had been described by himself: “The house I shall purchase is in a beautiful situation, is convenient, has a large kitchen, a well-room, a wood-house, besides two barns and a shop on the premises, and one and a half acres of land; price, about $1,350; and there is a good young orchard near for sale, so that we can keep a horse and one or two cows and have apples of our own from the money we shall reserve after paying our debts.” A row of quince-trees “whose early blossoms were so tender and whose switches were so tough—ah! those trees used to come home very near to me!” was on the north side of the house.^[2]

The home circle was large and varied. There were at this time the parents and six children, “Sister Roxana and her little group of countless numbers.” “Aunt Mary Hubbard,” the mother’s favorite sister, “spent much of her time with us, and some of mother’s favorite pupils from East Hampton, who had come to attend Miss Pierce’s school, sought a home in our family. Betsy Burr, an orphan cousin, lived with us like an adopted daughter, while the kitchen department was under the care of the good and affectionate Zillah and Rachel, who came with us and completed the home circle.”

The circle was still farther enlarged by the coming of Grandma Beecher and Aunt Esther, who, it will be remembered, was Lyman Beecher’s half-sister—“a woman,” as Henry Ward once said, “so good and modest that she will spend ages in heaven wondering how it ever happened that she ever got there, and that all the angels will be wondering why she was not there from all eternity.” “They occupied half of the next house to ours on the way to Prospect Hill, making a place of daily resort for some of the family.”

The Beecher Residence at Litchfield.

“Uncle Samuel Foote,” the mother’s sea-captain brother, 40“came among us, on his return from each voyage, as a sort of brilliant genius of another sphere, bringing gifts and wonders that seemed to wake new faculties in all. Whenever he came to Litchfield he brought a stock of new books, which he and Aunt Mary read aloud.”

It will be seen that, without referring to other inmates of the family, such as boarders and visitors, who afforded a great variety, some amusing and others instructive, the things which Henry Ward said were “the great treasures of a dwelling—the child’s cradle, the grandmother’s chair, the hearth and the old-fashioned fireplace, the table and the window”—were all there, and a great many things beside.

There were trials, almost hardships we should call them, as appears from a letter of Mrs. Beecher’s dated January 13, 1811, but none of them sufficient to bring discouragement or destroy her interest in scientific subjects: “... Would now write you a long letter, if it were not for several vexing circumstances, such as the weather extremely cold, storm violent, and no wood cut; Mr. Beecher gone, and Sabbath day, with company—a clergyman, a stranger; Catharine sick; George almost so; Rachel’s finger cut off, and she crying and groaning with the pain. Mr. Beecher is gone to preach in New Hartford, and did not provide us wood enough to last, seeing the weather has grown so exceedingly cold.... As for reading, I average perhaps one page a week besides what I do on Sundays. I expect to be obliged to be contented (if I can) with the stock of knowledge I already possess, except what I can glean from the conversation of others.... Mary has, I suppose, told you of the discovery that the fixed alkalies are metallic oxides. I first saw the notice in the Christian Observer. I have since seen it in an Edinburgh Review. The former mentioned that the metals have been obtained by means of the galvanic battery; the latter mentions another and, they say, a better mode. I think this is all the knowledge I have obtained in the whole circle of arts and sciences of late; if you have been more fortunate, pray let me reap the benefit.”

Looking at both its sunshine and its shadows, this Litchfield parsonage offers an illustration of an ideal New England home. The household was large, large enough to contain in itself a great variety of resources, and able in that roomy house to offer a broad hospitality to all comers. Democratic in the best sense 41of the word, servants being considered and treated as constituent members; wide awake, reading all the new books, discussing all the vital questions of the day, arguing all the knotty points of theology; industrious and frugal; allied to the best life of the place and the times, with a broad outlook that took within its horizon all the interests of country and humanity, of the kingdom of God at home and abroad, social, political, and spiritual, it was good soil, and a good exposure for planting a tree whose branches should spread abroad throughout the land and the whole earth.

Into this family was born a son, June 24, 1813—“the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh child, somewhere thereabouts,” as he himself says in a speech before the London Congregational Board, with that forgetfulness of numbers which was always characteristic of him. In fact, the ninth child, the eighth living at the time. It was in one of his favorite months, that of June, “which bursts out from the gates of heaven with all that is youngest, and clothed with that which is the most tender and beautiful,” that he began his career.

The grandmother, Roxana Foote, being with her daughter at the time, and remembering her own two favorite sons, who died in youth, named the new-born infant after his uncles, Henry and Ward.

They were stirring times, those of the early summer of 1813. The second war of our national independence was then in progress, and tidings had just reached the village that Fort Brown had been captured by the United States forces. Lyman Beecher says of those times:

“Our dangers in the war of 1812 were very great, so great that human skill and power were felt to be in vain. Thick clouds begirt the horizon, the storm roared louder and louder; it was dark as midnight, every pilot trembled, and from most all hope that we should be saved was taken away; and when from impenetrable darkness the sun burst suddenly upon us and peace came, we said: ‘Our soul is escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowler. The snare is broken and we are escaped.’”

Across the water Napoleon was rallying from the disaster of his Russian campaign, and making the Continent again resound with the roar of his cannon. Not only did these events 42stir mind and heart of all alike, but the increased taxation and the high prices that resulted from a world at war were severely felt in the parsonage. Mrs. Lyman Beecher wrote: “We feel the war somewhat more than we should one between the Turks and Crim Tartars, inasmuch as, for the most part, every article is double or treble the former price, and some things even more than that.”

These were also the days of the inauguration of some of those great moral movements that are even now in progress in this State and in the land. It was but the year before that the General Association of Connecticut, under the leadership of Lyman Beecher, had taken decided action upon the temperance question. In speaking of it he says:

“I was not headstrong then, but I was heart-strong—oh! very, very! From that time on the movement went on, not only in Connecticut but marching through New England and marching through the world. Glory to God! Oh! how it wakes my old heart up to think of it!”

Morals in general at this time were at a low ebb, and he secured the organization of a “General Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Promotion of Good Morals in the State.”

His sermon upon the “Building of Waste Places” resulted in the institution of a “Domestic Missionary Society” for the work of home evangelization in Connecticut, and he had already secured a Foreign Missionary Society for Litchfield, which was one of the most efficient auxiliaries of the American Board, then but recently established. The conflict concerning the Standing Order which in 1818 resulted in the withdrawal of State aid from the Congregational churches, and which Dr. Beecher feared as likely to open the flood-gates of ruin upon the State, and by reason of which he says, “I suffered what no tongue can tell, for the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut,” was just beginning.

In all the movements of this progressive period stands this village parsonage, like an outpost of an advancing army, held almost within the enemy’s lines.

Added to these public labors and troubles a very heavy family sorrow was laid upon them during this year. The mother, for months before the birth of her ninth child, saw her favorite sister, Mary Hubbard, slowly wasting away with consumption, 44and had need to call up all her resources of faith and resignation to meet this complication of trials that was upon them.

Room in which Mr. Beecher was born.

So this child was nourished, even before birth, in the sweet spirit of a most godly soul, deepened and chastened by both private griefs and public sorrows, and was ushered into the world at an era of most important events, into the very midst of multiplied labors and stirring, progressive movements. All these formed, as it were, an atmosphere of influence as imperceptible to the eye as common air, but as powerful in moulding character in its formative periods as are the natural forces in shaping the mountains or growing the forests. By virtue of that law by which the offspring are affected by those things which most interest the parents, we may safely say that Henry Ward Beecher was in part a product of the times that preceded, attended, and followed his birth, and was stamped by their strong and peculiar characteristics. He carried war in him as a birth-mark, but with him it was war against wickedness and wrong.

The springs of consolation, which flowed from him in after-years for the relief of troubled souls the world over, were such as his mother resorted to in days of trial, and were opened to him in her bosom; and he was continually pressing forward through life to some new measure of reform, to some new step of attainment, by virtue of that reforming, progressive age that so early became a very part of his nature.

The Elms and Well which Mark the Site of “The Beecher House” in Litchfield.

Early Glimpses—Recollections of the Mother—Going to School at Ma’am Kilbourne’s—His First Letter—District School—The Coming of the New Mother—His First Ride on Horseback—A Merry Household—Fishing Excursions—Minister’s Wood-Spell—Saturday Night—Going to Meeting—The Puritan Sabbath—The Cold of Litchfield Hill—Rats—Work—The Catechism—Formative Influences—Summing Up.

We of course see but little of him in these early years.

“The younger members of the Beecher family came into existence in a great, bustling household of older people, all going their several ways and having their own grown-up interests to carry.

“The child growing up in this busy, active circle had constantly impressed upon it a sense of personal insignificance as a child, and the absolute need of the virtue of passive obedience and non-resistance as regards all grown-up people. To be statedly washed and dressed and catechised, got to school at regular hours in the morning and to bed inflexibly at the earliest possible hour at night, comprised about all the attention that children could receive in those days.”

Here and there a glimpse is given, just enough to tell us the direction the stream is taking. The first is found in a letter of the mother to her sister, Harriet Foote, written when he was a little more than a year old:

“July 12, 1814.—... I arrived Saturday at sunset, and found all well, and boy (Henry Ward) in merry trim, glad at heart to be safe on terra firma after all his jolts and tossings.”

Again in November of the same year:

“I write sitting upon my feet with my paper on the seat of a chair, while Henry is hanging round my neck and climbing on my back.”

He himself gives an experience of a little later period:

“I remember very well when I was but two years old (strange as it may seem; sometimes I think I spent all my remembering power on that early period!) finding myself in the 47east entry of my father’s great house, alone, coming down-stairs, or trying to. The sudden sense which I had of being alone frightened me, and I gave one shriek; and then the echo of my voice scared me worse, and I gave another shriek that was more emphatic; and I remember seeing the light stream in from the dining-room, and being taken up by loving hands. The face I do not recall, the form I do not recall; but I remember the warm pressure. It was my mother, who died when I was three years old. She took me to her bosom. I recollect sitting by the side of some one who made me feel very happy; and I recollect seeing my father’s swart face on the other side of the table.

“Now I could not paint my mother’s face; but I know how her bosom felt. I know how her arms felt. I have a filial sense, a child’s interpretation, of motherhood. It was only an emotion or instinct in me, but it was blessed.”

This incident of the mother is supplemented by two of the sister Harriet, in which the little boy Henry had a part:

“In my own early childhood,” she says, “only two incidents of my mother twinkle like rays through the darkness. One was of our all running and dancing out before her from the nursery to the sitting-room one Sabbath morning, and her pleasant voice saying after us, ‘Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.’”

Another remembrance is this: “Mother was an enthusiastic horticulturist in all the small ways that limited means allowed. Her brother John, in New York, had just sent her a small parcel of tulip bulbs. I remember rummaging these out of an obscure corner of the nursery one day when she was out, and being strongly seized with the idea that they were good to eat, and using all the little English I possessed to persuade my brothers that these were onions such as grown people ate, and would be very nice for us. So we fell to and devoured the whole; and I recollect being somewhat disappointed in the odd, sweetish taste, and thinking that onions were not as nice as I had supposed. Then mother’s serene face appeared at the nursery door, and we all ran toward her and with one voice began to tell our discovery and achievement. We had found this bag of onions and had eaten them all up. Also I remember that there was not even a momentary expression of impatience, but that she sat down and said: ‘My dear children, what you have done makes mamma very sorry. Those were not onion-roots, but roots of 48beautiful flowers; and if you had let them alone ma would have had next summer in the garden great, beautiful red and yellow flowers such as you never saw.’ I remember how drooping and dispirited we all grew at this picture, and how sadly we regarded the empty bag.”

When the mother grew sick and the children were admitted to her bedside once a day, Henry was among the number, although no memory of the fact lingered with him in after-years.

Mrs. Stowe writes of this event:

“I have a vision of a very fair face with a bright red spot on each cheek, and a quiet smile as she offered me a spoonful of her gruel; of our dreaming one night, we little ones, that mamma had got well, and waking in loud transports of joy, and being hushed down by some one coming into the room. Our dream was indeed a true one. She was for ever well; but they told us she was dead, and took us in to see what seemed so cold and so unlike anything we had ever seen or known of her.”

Mrs. Reeve, one of the most intimate friends of the family, writes of the last day of her life:

“She told her husband that her views and anticipations of heaven had been so great that she could hardly sustain it, and if they had been increased she should have been overwhelmed, and that her Saviour had constantly blessed her; that she had peace without one cloud, and that she had never during her sickness prayed for her life. She dedicated her sons to God for missionaries, and said that her greatest desire was that her children might be trained up for God, and she trusted God would, in his own time, provide another companion for him that would more than fill her place.

“She spoke of the advancement of Christ’s kingdom with joy, and of the glorious day that was ushering in.

“She attempted to speak to her children, but she was extremely exhausted, and their cries and sobs were such that she could say but little. She told them that God could do more for them than she had done or could do, and that they must trust him.

“Mr. Beecher then made a prayer, in which he gave her back to God and dedicated all that they held in common to him. She then fell into a sweet sleep from which she awoke in heaven. It is a most moving scene to see eight little children weeping 49around the bed of a dying mother; but still it was very cheering to see how God could take away the sting of death and give such a victory over the grave.”

Mr. Beecher’s remembrance of this event was simply of a feeling of fear and pain at the weeping of the children around him, and of interest in the baby, Charles, in his little white dress, as he was lifted up in the arms of one of the attendants.

Of the funeral we read from Mrs. Stowe’s pen:

“Henry was too little to go; I remember his golden curls and little black frock, as he frolicked like a kitten in the sun in ignorant joy.

“I remember the mourning dresses, the tears of the older children, the walking to the burial-ground and somebody’s speaking at the grave, and the audible sobbing of the family; and then all was closed, and we little ones, to whom it was so confused, asked the question where she was gone and would she never come back? They told us at one time that she had been laid in the ground, at another that she had gone to heaven. Whereupon Henry, putting the two things together, resolved to dig through the ground and go to find her; for being discovered under sister Catherine’s window one morning digging with great zeal and earnestness, she called to him to know what he was doing, and, lifting his curly head, with great simplicity he answered: ‘Why, I am going to heaven to find ma!’”

We next hear of him in a letter written by his sister, February 1, 1817:

“... Henry is a very good boy, and we think him a remarkably interesting child, and he grows dearer to us every day. He is very affectionate, and seems to love his father with all his heart. His constant prattle is a great amusement to us all. He often speaks of his sister Harriet, and wishes spring would come, so that she might come home and go to school with him.”

This was in the winter when he was past three years old.

Perhaps the prattle of this one will be instructive as well as amusing some day. Who knows?

At last spring comes, and with it his sister Harriet from her long visit at Nutplains, and an important era in his life opens. He begins to go to school, with her as his companion and guardian.

He is just four years old that summer, the usual age for school 50beginnings in rural New England. They went to Ma’am Kilbourne’s on West Street, and there he clambered up the first rounds of the ladder of book-learning and took his first lessons. These consisted in repeating his letters twice a day, such as he could remember, and having the others pointed out to him from Webster’s spelling-book, as he stood, a chubby, bare-footed, round, rosy-faced boy, in front of the dreaded schoolma’am, who had been made sharp and angular by her years of labor in sharpening the intellectual faculties of generations of children.

In due time Charles is large enough to join the older brother and sister, and tells us:

“I remember all three of us coming out of our yard and stringing along, holding each other by the hand and saying every morning, ‘What if a great big dog should come out at us?’ and Henry, as the larger brother and protector of the group, answering, ‘I would take an axe and chop his head off.’”

As yet he wears his hair in long golden curls, the badge of a continued infantile state; but some of the girls at school improvising a pair of shears from the pieces of tin thrown out from a shop near by, and cutting off some of the coveted locks, it is thought best at home to cut them all off; and now, with trousers, and suspenders, and jacket, and short hair, and bare feet, he emerges from the half-infantile, girlish state and becomes a full-fledged boy, much to his own satisfaction: “he considered that his manhood had now commenced.”

That the instruction of his teacher is not all thrown away is evident by the letter which he wrote at this time, when he was five years old, of which a facsimile is given. Its merits of directness and originality, at least in the matter of spelling, will be readily recognized:

Der Sister
WE AR AL WEL
MA HAZ A BABY
THE OLD SOW HAZ SIX PIGS

51One incident of about these times, which is related by his brother, is ludicrously prophetic:

“I remember Henry’s coming in and taking his turn” (reading to Aunt Esther). “Once the piece was about wild beasts, and it said ‘two monstrous lions came out.’ I can see Henry’s red face and declamatory air as he read it ‘two monstrofalous great lions came out.’”

From Widow Kilbourne’s he graduated into the district school, which was a few rods north of the parsonage, and was attended by all the children of quite a large farming district. Like the other children, he carried sewing and knitting, and the sister tells us that “this bashful, dazed-looking boy pattered bare-foot to and from the little unpainted school-house, with a brown towel or a blue checked apron to hem during the intervals between his spelling and reading lessons.”

His eagerness for sister Harriet to return, that he may begin school, has long since subsided, and given place to an unusual dislike for his whole district-school experience, as appears from reminiscences which he wrote in after-years:

“It was our misfortune, in boyhood, to go to a district school. It was a little, square pine building, blazing in the sun, upon the highway, without a tree for shade or sight near it; without bush, yard, fence, or circumstance to take off its bare, cold, hard, hateful look. Before the door, in winter, was the pile of wood for fuel, and in summer there were all the chips of the winter’s wood. In winter we were squeezed into the recess of the farthest corner, among little boys, who seemed to be sent to school merely to fill up the chinks between the bigger boys. Certainly we were never sent for any such absurd purpose as an education. There were the great scholars—the school in winter was for them, not for us pickaninnies. We were read and spelt twice a day, unless something happened to prevent, which did happen about every other day. For the rest of the time we were busy in keeping still. And a time we always had of it! Our shoes always would be scraping on the floor or knocking the shins of urchins who were also being ‘educated.’ All of our little legs together (poor, tired, nervous, restless legs with nothing to do!) would fill up the corner with such a noise that, every ten or fifteen minutes, the master would bring down his two-foot hickory ferule on the desk with a clap that sent shivers through 52our hearts to think how that would have felt if it had fallen somewhere else; and then, with a look that swept us all into utter extremity of stillness, he would cry, ‘Silence in that corner!’ It would last for a few minutes; but little boys’ memories are not capacious. Moreover, some of the boys had mischief, and some had mirthfulness, and some had both together. The consequence was that just when we were the most afraid to laugh we saw the most comical things. Temptations which we could have vanquished with a smile out in the free air were irresistible in our little corner, where a laugh and a spank were very apt to woo each other. So we would hold on and fill up; and others would hold on and fill up too; till by and by the weakest would let go a mere whiffet of a laugh, and then down went all the precautions, and one went off, and another, and another, touching the others off like a pack of fire-crackers! It was in vain to deny it. But as the process of snapping our heads and pulling our ears went on with primitive sobriety, we each in turn, with tearful eyes and blubbering lips, declared ‘we didn’t mean to,’ and that was true; and that ‘we wouldn’t do so any more,’ and that was a lie, however unintentional, for we never failed to do just so again, and that about once an hour all day long.

“Besides this our principal business was to shake and shiver at the beginning of the school for very cold; and to sweat and stew for the rest of the time before the fervid glances of a great box iron stove, red-hot. There was one great event of horror and two of pleasure: the first was the act of going to school, comprehending the leaving off play, the face-washing and clothes-inspecting, the temporary play-spell before the master came, the outcry, ‘There he is! the master is coming!’ the hurly-burly rush, and the noisy clattering to our seats. The other two events of pleasure were the play-spell and the dismissal. O dear! can there be anything worse for a lively, mercurial, mirthful, active little boy than going to a winter district school? Yes—going to a summer district school! There is no comparison. The one is the Miltonic depth, below the deepest depth.

“A woman kept the school, sharp, precise, unsympathetic, keen, and untiring. Of all ingenious ways of fretting little boys doubtless her ways were the most expert. Not a tree to shelter the house; the sun beat down on the shingles and clapboards till the pine knots shed pitchy tears, and the air was redolent of hot 53pine-wood smell. The benches were slabs with legs in them. The desks were slabs at an angle, cut, hacked, scratched; each year’s edition of jack-knife literature overlaying its predecessor, until it then wore cuttings and carvings two or three inches deep. But if we cut a morsel, or stuck in pins, or pinched off splinters, the little sharp-eyed mistress was on hand, and one look of her eye was worse than a sliver in our foot, and one nip of her fingers was equal to a jab of a pin; for we had tried both.

“We envied the flies—merry fellows! bouncing about, tasting that apple-skin, patting away at that crumb of bread; now out the window, then in again; on your nose, on your neighbor’s cheek, off to the very schoolma’am’s lips; dodging her slap, and then letting off a real round and round buzz, up, down, this way, that way, and every way. Oh! we envied the flies more than anything, except the birds. The windows were so high that we could not see the grassy meadows; but we could see the tops of distant trees, and the far, deep, bounteous blue sky. There flew the robins; there went the blue-birds: and there went we. We followed that old polyglot, the skunk-blackbird, and heard him describe the way they talked at the winding up of the Tower of Babel. We thanked every meadow-lark that sung on, rejoicing as it flew. Now and then a ‘chipping-bird’ would flutter on the very window-sill, turn its little head sidewise, and peer in on the medley of boys and girls. Long before we knew that it was in Scripture we sighed: Oh! that we had the wings of a bird; we would fly away and be out of this hateful school. As for learning, the sum of all that we ever got at a district school would not cover the first ten letters of the alphabet. One good, kind, story-telling, Bible-rehearsing aunt at home, with apples and ginger-bread premiums, is worth all the schoolma’ams that ever stood by to see poor little fellows roast in those boy-traps called district schools.

“I have not a single pleasant recollection in connection with my school-boy days. The woods were full of temptations, the trees called me, the birds wanted me, the brooks sung entreaties. It seemed cruel to be shut up. The brooks, birds, flowers, sunshine, and breezes were free; why not I?”

In the autumn of 1817, when Henry Ward was a few months past four years of age, Dr. Lyman Beecher married Miss Harriet 54Porter, of Portland, Maine, and brought his bride at once to Litchfield.

The advent of the new mother is thus described by Mrs. Stowe:

“I was about six years old and slept in the nursery with my two younger brothers, Henry and Charles. We heard father’s voice in the entry, and started up in our little beds, crying out as he entered our room, ‘Why, here’s pa!’ A cheerful voice called out from behind him, ‘And here’s ma.’

“A beautiful lady, very fair, with bright blue eyes and soft auburn hair bound round with a black velvet bandeau, came into the room smiling, eager and happy-looking, and, coming up to our beds, kissed us and told us that she loved little children and that she would be our mother. Never did stepmother make a prettier or sweeter impression. The next morning I remember we looked at her with awe. She seemed to us so fair, so delicate, so elegant that we were almost afraid to go near her. We must have been rough, red-cheeked, hearty country children, honest, obedient, and bashful. She was peculiarly dainty and neat in all her ways and arrangements; and I remember I used to feel breezy and rough and rude in her presence. We felt a little in awe of her, as if she were a strange princess rather than our own mamma; but her voice was very sweet, her ways of moving and speaking very graceful, and she took us up in her lap and let us play with her beautiful hands, which seemed wonderful things made of pearl and ornamented with strange rings.”

In a letter written to her sister Mrs. Beecher gives her impressions of the group. She says: “We surprised them here almost as much as Mr. Beecher did us. They did not expect us till the following evening, but it was a joyful surprise to them. I never saw so many rosy cheeks and laughing eyes. The little ones were all joy and gladness. They began all, the first thing, to tell their dreams, for it seems they have dreamed of nothing else but father’s coming home; and some dreamed he came without me, and some that he brought two mothers. They all became immediately very free and social, except the youngest (Charles), and he is quite shy; calls me ‘lady,’ and sometimes ‘dear lady,’ but he loves aunt much the best. I have never seen a finer family of children, or a more agreeable. I am delighted with the great familiarity and great respect subsisting 55between parent and children. It is a house of great cheerfulness and comfort, and I am beginning to feel at home. Harriet and Henry are very desirous for me to send their love.”

Later she writes of them:

“I perceive them to be of agreeable habits, and some of them of uncommon intellect.... Harriet and Henry come next, and they are always hand-in-hand. They are as lovely children as I ever saw, amiable, affectionate, and very bright.... Our dwelling is pleasantly situated. The garden yields plenty of vegetables for the year, plenty of cherries, and the orchard furnishes cider and apples enough. A barrel of apple-sauce is made in the fall, which the children use instead of butter.... The boys are up before it is quite day, and make fires, and we are all down and have prayers before sunrise. Our domestic worship is very delightful. We sing a good deal and have reading aloud as much as we can.”

The following silhouette, although following the last by quite an interval of time—it is in 1819—is our next family picture in order:

“Papa is well and is still writing that piece with a hard name, I can’t remember what. Mamma is well, and don’t laugh any more than she used to. Catherine goes on just as she always did, making fun for everybody. George is as usual. Harriet makes just as many wry faces, is just as odd, and loves to be laughed at just as much as ever. Henry does not improve much in talking, but speaks very thick. Charles is the most mischievous little fellow I ever knew. He seems to do it for the very love of it; is punished and punished again, but it has no effect. He is the same honest little boy, and I love him dearly.”

It must have been about this time that Henry had the experience which he thus describes:

“When I was a lad I was ambitious to ride, but never was permitted to ride except behind an elder brother; but one fair morning, as the horse was brought out to be watered, I bestrode him and took the reins in my hand. He made for the brook with considerable celerity; but though he was nimble I was willing, and I succeeded in holding on and getting back without any accident. So elated was I with my first attempt at horseback-riding that I felt that I was the horseman of the neighborhood. The next morning I repeated the ride, but with a 56variation; for, being unaccustomed to some of the phases of horseback-riding, I was not prepared for what occurred. The horse did not perform just as I wanted him to, so I laid the whip on him, and he darted forward, and when he reached the edge of the brook he suddenly stopped and I went on!”

They are a merry lot of children, getting up little impromptu concerts, charades, and games of all kinds, at one time going so far as to dramatize a favorite story. They “curtain off the end of the parlor,” and “complete the entertainment amid thunders of applause.”

Animal life is regarded, and the absent members of the family are kept duly informed of the well-being of their favorites:

“Old Puss is very well and sends her respects to you. And Mr. Black Trip has come out of the barn to live, and says if you ever come into the kitchen he will jump up and lick your hands and pull your frock, just as he serves the rest of us. Henry and Charles love to play with him very much.”

Little events in the family are noted and immortalized in verse, of which the following letter is a sample:

“... Apropos, last week was interred Tom, Junior, with funeral honors, by the side of old Tom of happy memory. What a fatal mortality there is among the cats of the parsonage! Our Harriet is chief mourner always at their funerals. She asked for what she called an epethet for the grave-stone of Tom, Junior, which I gave as follows:

When Henry was eight years old we read of the three in this wise:

“Harriet reads everything she can lay her hands on, and sews and knits diligently. Henry and Charles go to school. Henry is as sprightly and active, and Charles as honest and clumsy, as ever.”

Later in the year he can be had if really wanted:

“We have four boarders besides our own sick folk, so that if you are lonesome for want of children we could easily spare Henry or Harriet.”

57Whether the hint was taken, and the boy who was sometimes too “sprightly and active” and this girl who “reads everything she can lay her hands on” were wanted and sent, is not told. The next year perhaps they would not care to spare him. “I had the alders down at the bottom of the east lot cut up, broke it up, and planted to corn and potatoes. Henry and Charles began to help hoe a little.” Any one who has had experience in such matters knows that hoeing potatoes in a newly-ploughed field just cleared of alders is no fun. At this time Henry was nine years old.

It has been said by one whose hatred of orthodox religion is only equalled by the beauty of the language with which he is able to clothe his misconceptions, that “Henry Ward Beecher was born in a Puritan penitentiary, of which his father was one of the wardens; a prison with very narrow and closely-grated windows.” But Mrs. Stowe wrote years ago: “One of my most vivid impressions of the family, as it was in my childish days, was of a great household inspired by a spirit of cheerfulness and hilarity, and of my father, although pressed and driven with business, always lending an attentive ear to anything in the way of life and social fellowship.”

The brother Charles, who was an almost inseparable companion for Henry in those days, says in a letter recently received: “The parental authority was pronounced but not very strict. That is, there was never any thought in the mind of the children of disobedience, but resort to corporal punishment was rare.

“Nor was brother Henry made to work very hard, nor was father very strait-laced or stern. Nor were we often switched, tho’ I dare say we deserved it. I only remember once distinctly, when Henry performed the gymnastics and I furnished the music (out in the barn). Fortunately for me, the switch was mostly used up on him as the elder—a birthright I did not envy—and I howled in sympathy, with a few cuts for Da Capo.

“The fact is, father was very fond of all his children and frolicked and romped with them. All the work there was to do (chores we called it) was to take care of a horse and cow, and in spring make garden, and, after wood-spell, carry in and pile up wood. I remember that we were told if we made the garden so and so, or did this or that, we should go fishing; and we used to go, the whole family of us, to Little Pond or 58Great Pond, and catch ‘Perchy, roachy, bullhead,’ as we sang it. One afternoon at Little Pond, where father had taken Henry and me in the chaise (‘one-hoss’), we were catching roach when the church-bell rang, and father remembered that it was Preparatory Lecture, and the way we scurried in the old vehicle may be imagined.”

Mrs. Stowe writes: “I remember when the wood was all in and piled and the chips swept up, then father tackled the horse into the cart and proclaimed a grand fishing party down to Little Pond; and how we all floated among the lily-pads in our boat, christened ‘The Yellow Perch,’ and every one of us caught a string of fish, which we displayed in triumph on our return.”

The father was very wise in directing the homely labors of the household, so that they became occasions of mental stimulus.

“I have the image of my father still, as he sat working the apple-peeler. ‘Come, George,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do to make the evening go off. You and I’ll take turns and see who’ll tell the most out of Scott’s novels’ (for those were the days when the ‘Tales of my Landlord’ and ‘Ivanhoe’ had just appeared); and so they took them novel by novel, reciting scenes and incidents, which kept the eyes of all the children wide open and made the work go on without flagging.

“Occasionally he would raise a point of theology on some incident narrated, and ask the opinion of one of his boys and run a sort of tilt with him, taking up the wrong side of the question for the sake of seeing how the youngster could practise his logic. If the party on the other side did not make a fair hit at him, however, he would stop and explain to him what he ought to have said: ‘The argument lies so, my son; do that and you’ll trip me up.’ Much of his teaching to his children was in this informal way.”

A kindly country life surrounded the minister’s family, that could not fail of stamping the impress of its plain sincerity upon all who were brought in contact with it. Once a year this came to its climax in the winter’s wood-spell, when all the farmers upon a given day added their contribution to the minister’s wood-pile—a festival of kindness and good cheer.

“The kind farmers wanted to see all the children, and we were busy as bees in waiting upon them. The boys heated the 59flip-irons and passed around the cider and flip, while Aunt Esther and the daughters were as busy in serving the doughnuts, cake, and cheese.”

Another influence we must not forget, and that was, being let alone. “I think,” he says, “that I was about as well brought up as most children, because I was let alone. My father was so busy and my mother had so many other children to look after that, except here and there, I hardly came under the parental hand at all. I was brought up in a New England village, and I knew where the sweet-flag was, where the hickory-trees were, where the chestnut-trees were, where the sassafras-trees were, where the squirrels were, where all things were that boys enterprise after, therefore I had a world of things to do, and so I did not come much in contact with family government.” “Nobody,” so says his sister, “thought much of his future, further than to see that he was safe and healthy, or even troubled themselves to inquire what might be going on in his life.”

Some of the reminiscences of this period now given in his own words are interesting, not only from the wide field which they cover, but from the revelation they make of the susceptibility of his nature to outside influences. Of “going to meeting” he discourses in this wise:

“The coming on of Saturday night was always a serious business with the youngsters. We had no stores of religious experience on which it is presumed the old folks meditated, and the prospect of a whole day without anything in it to interest us was not a little gloomy. On no night of the week did the frogs croak so dismally, or the tree toads whistle in a mood so melancholy, as on Saturday night.

“But those blazing summer mornings! What a wealth of light spread over that blessed old hill-top! What a wondrous silence dwelt in the great round heavens above our head! The birds sang on. The crows in the distance called out to each other in hoarse discourse. The trees stood in calm beauty—the great elm-trees, tall, pliant, graceful, the perfection of strength and beauty. All this we saw and heard while buttoning up our Sunday clothes by the side of the open window. For the cow and horse had been foddered, and the pigs fed, and all the barn chores done up, and a bountiful breakfast eaten, and our face and hands washed, and every article of apparel, from shoe to hat, had 60changed from a secular to a sacred use. Not the every-day hat, soft, shapeless, universal instrument, used as a liquid or solid measure; used now for the head, and now for a football; used for a net to catch butterflies or to throw at wasps—no, not this bag, pocket, hat, pouch, and magazine, but the Sunday hat, round, stiff, hard, and respectable.

“Although the new hat was always disagreeable to our head, yet we had a wonderful reverence for it, and spent no inconsiderable portion of our time in church in getting it dirty and then brushing it clean.

“Our jacket, too, was new. Only a handkerchief was then in the pocket; no knife, no marbles, no strings, no stones, no fishhooks or dried angle-worms. No; a boy’s Sunday pocket of the olden time was purged of all temptation. In meeting-time we often put our little hands down into our Sunday pocket with a melancholy wish, ‘Oh! if I only had my other clothes on!’

“As soon as we were dressed and mustered in the sitting-room an inspection was had. The collar was pulled up a little, the hair had a fresh lick from the brush, the mouth must be wiped with a wet towel, the shoestring tied, and, after being turned round and round, we were started off.

“‘Now, Henry, be a good boy.’

“‘Yes, ma’am.’

“‘You must not laugh, or tease Harriet.’

“‘No, ma’am.’

“‘Don’t stop on the road—go right in when you get to church.’

“‘Yes, ma’am.”

“Every word was sincerely promised, and efficaciously broken within ten minutes.

“Oh! how high the trees seemed! Oh! how bright the heavens were! Oh! how hard it was not to play with Chester Covington’s dog, that came running to us with bark and frolic, and seemed perplexed at our sturdy propriety.

“The old musical bell up in the open belfry was busy a-tolling. It was the only thing that was allowed to work on Sunday—the bell and the minister. That bell-rope was always an object of desire and curiosity to our young days. It ran up into such dark and mysterious spaces. What there was up in those pokerish heights in the belfry tower we did not know, but something 61that made our flesh creep. Once we ventured to pull that rope. It was a bold and venturesome thing, we knew. But a sorcery was on us. It came gently and easily to the hand. We pulled again. ‘Dong! dong!’ went the bell. The old sexton put his head out of the door when, on that particular morning, service had begun, and said, in a very solemn and low tone, ‘Boy! boy! you little devil you!’ and much more, I presume, but I did not wait for it, but cut round to the other door and sat all church-time trembling and wondering whether he would ‘tell my pa’; and if he did, what he would say, and more especially what he would do. I called up the probable interview. I had numerous precedents on which to found a possible experience, and afflicted our little soul all meeting-time with needless punishment by the imagination.

“But ordinarily we escaped into the minister’s pew without special temptations. Imagine a boy of eight years old, round as an apple, hearty and healthy, an hour and a half in church with nothing to do! We looked at the galleries full of boys and girls, and wished we might go into the galleries. We looked at the ceiling, traced all the cracks back and forth. We looked at the dear old aunties all round the church, fanning themselves with one hand and eating fennel-seed or a bit of dried orange-peel out of the other. We gazed out of the window high above our heads into the clouds, and wished we could only climb up and see the trees and horses and dogs that abounded around the church on Sunday.

“Gradually these died out and we dropped asleep. Blessed liberty! the child’s gospel! All trouble fled away. For a half-hour paradise was gained. But then an unusual thump on the pulpit Bible, and the ring and roar of a voice under full excitement, that went on swelling like a trumpet, and that no one, not the most listless, could hear without catching its excitement, waked us, blushing and confused that we had been asleep in church! Even on the serene and marble face of mother the faint suggestion of a smile came, as we clutched our hat, supposing meeting to be over, and then sheepishly dropped it and sank back in dismay. But even Sunday cannot hold out for ever, and meetings have to let out sometime! So, at length, a universal stir and bustle announced that it was time to go. Up we bolted! Down we sat as quick as if a million pins were 62sticking in our foot! The right leg was asleep! Limping forth into the open air, relief came to our heart. The being out of doors had always an inexpressible charm, and never so much as on Sunday. Away went the wagons. Away went the people. The whole Green swarmed with folks. The long village streets were full of company. In ten minutes all were gone, and the street was given up again to the birds!

“Little good did preaching do me until after I was fifteen years old—little good immediately. Yet the whole Sunday, the peculiar influence which it exerted on the household, the general sense of awe which it inspired, the very rigor of its difference from other days, and the suspended animation of its sermon time, served to produce upon the young mind a profound impression. A day that stood out from all others in a hard and gaunt way might, perhaps, be justly criticised. But it left its mark. It did its work upon the imagination, if not upon the reason. It had power in it; and in estimating moral excellence power is an element of the utmost importance. Will our smooth, cosey, feeble modern Sundays have such a grip on the moral nature? They are far pleasanter. Are they as efficacious? Will they educate the moral nature as much?”

The cold of Litchfield Hill and the exposure of his old home were always remembered.

“You may think you know something about winter; but if you never spent a winter on old Litchfield Hill, where I was brought up, you do not know much about it. It was before the days of stoves. There were what we called ‘box-stoves,’ but they were a very small power for generating heat. The idea of a furnace was not born. It was not even within the reach of a prophet to predict it.

“My father’s house was a great barn of a structure, with rooms scattered about here and there. Mine was the west and north room—on the corner; so that I had the full benefit, without any subtraction or discount, of everything that was going on out of doors; for double windows were not known, and the carpenters did not care about making a tight fit. Therefore the wind found no trouble in coming in, and on many and many a morning the snow had blown from the window to my bed and across the foot of it; and if anything inspires alacrity of step on 63a winter morning when the feet are bare, it is a drift of snow. Walking on it is like walking on wasps.

“To go back to the frigid houses of New England in winter, without furnaces or hard coal, or air-tight stoves or steam, would make our dainty skin tingle. What a pother is made to ascertain the exact position of the North Pole, the very centre and navel of cold! Why, I could have pointed to the exact spot sixty years ago. It was on the northwest angle of my father’s house in Litchfield, Connecticut, in the room where I slept.”

Not only did the severity of the elements affect him, but their uproar as well, especially in the night-time.

“The war of winter winds to our young ears was terrible as the thunder of waves or the noise of battle. All night long the cold, shelterless trees moaned. Their strong crying penetrated our sleep and shaped our dreams. At every waking the air was full of mighty winds. The house creaked and strained, and at some more furious gust shuddered and trembled all over. Then the windows rattled, the cracks and crevices whistled each its own distinctive note, and the chimneys, like diapasons of an organ, had their deep and hollow rumble.”

And now comes an influence that we should have passed by, if he himself had not given it place and elaborate notice:

“Next to the winds our night experiences in early boyhood were much affected by rats. The old house seemed to have been a favorite of this curious vermin. There is something in the short, hot glitter of a rat’s eye that has never ceased to affect us unpleasantly. We could not help imagining them to be the mere receptacles of mischievous spirits, and their keen eyes had always a kind of mocking expression, as if they said, ‘You think we are rats, but if we get hold of you you will know that we are a good deal more than that.’ We never could estimate how many populated our old house. The walls seemed like city thoroughfares, and the ceiling like a Forum or Roman theatre. We used to lie in bed and marvel at what was going on. Sometimes there would be a great stillness, as if they had all gone to meeting. Then again they would troop about with such a swell of liberty and gladness that it was quite plain that the meeting was out. But nothing ever scared and amused us so much as their way of going up and down the partitions. At first up would come one, then another, and finally quite a bevy, squeaking and frolicking, 64as if they were school-boys going up-stairs, nipping each other and cutting up all manner of pranks. Then came a stillness. Next a premonitory rat would rush down, evidently full of news, and immediately down would pour after him a stream of rats, rushing like mad, and apparently tumbling heels over head. By and by some old sawyer would commence where he left off the night before, cutting the same partition. To this must be added nibblings, rat-nestled paper, an occasional race of rats across the bed, the manipulation of corn in the garret, the foray with cats and kittens, the rat engines—‘steel traps,’ ‘box-traps,’ ‘figure-four’s,’ and all manner of devices, in spite of which the rats held their own, and, if allowed suffrage, would have outvoted the whole family, dog and cats to boot, four to one.”

He was early taught to work and endure what now might be called hardships.

“It was my duty, after I got to be about eight years old, to go down-stairs and build a fire. Ours was a house in which, when the weather was cold, if water was left in any vessel it would freeze and split the vessel asunder; and of course crockery had no chance. Our well used to choke up with ice so that we had to cut it out in order to get the bucket down; and sometimes, when the cistern was frozen up so that we could not get water from it, I have gone, on washing-days, two miles, and dipped water from a brook into barrels, and brought it home. Therefore you see that, however dainty I may be nowadays, I started on a very different pattern.”

But he came in after-years to be glad of this experience:

“I am thankful that I learned to hem towels—as I did. I know how to knit suspenders and mittens. I know a good deal about working in wood—sawing, chopping, splitting, planing, and things of that sort. I was brought up to put my hand to anything; so that when I went West, and was travelling on the prairies and my horse lost a shoe, and I came to a cross-road where there was an abandoned blacksmith’s shop, I could go in and start the fire, and fix the old shoe and put it on again. What man has done man can do; and it is a good thing to bring up boys so that they shall think they can do anything. I could do anything.”

The greatest trial of those days was the catechism. Sunday lessons were considered by the mother as inflexible duty, and the 65catechism was the sine qua non. “The other children memorized readily and were brilliant reciters, but Henry, blushing, stammering, confused, and hopelessly miserable, stuck fast on some sand-bank of what is required or forbidden by this or that commandment, his mouth choking up with the long words which he hopelessly miscalled, was sure to be accused of idleness or inattention, and to be solemnly talked to, which made him look more stolid and miserable than ever, but appeared to have no effect in quickening his dormant faculties.”

Such were the influences that were exerted upon Henry Ward Beecher during these early and formative years. Various as they were, they preserved a general character of healthful simplicity; and numerous as they appear, they can yet be readily generalized. The first were those that were addressed to conscience, and that went to make this the strong, influential factor which it became in all well-trained New England youth of that period, and in none more markedly than in him. The stepmother led in this work. She was the conscience of the family, training to the strict observance of duty with a thoroughness which the father, with his more impulsive nature, could never have equalled, although he was in sympathy with the process. Home duties carefully exacted, regular attendance upon school, the strict keeping the Sabbath, even the hated lesson in the catechism, were some of the instruments employed. Open to criticism, they may be, in method and extent, yet they did their work, and strong conscientiousness was developed that made him tremble at the thought of wrong-doing, and kept him so free from viciousness that he was able to say: “I never was sullied in act, nor in thought, nor in feeling when I was young. I grew up as pure as a woman.”

And although in after-years he gave more stress to heart than conscience, and preached the Gospel rather than the law, it was but the carrying out the natural process of soil-making and forest culture: the granite ridges of conscience formed the foundation, clothed and hidden by the growth, but not destroyed.

With all her admirable qualities his step-mother failed to satisfy his longing for affection.

“It pleased God to give me a second mother, a very eminent Christian woman. Now, my nature was enthusiastic and outgushing; I was like the convolvulus—I wanted to be running 66on somebody all the time. But my second mother was stately and not easy to approach. She was a beautiful person, serene and ladylike. She never lacked self-possession in speech, gesture, or posture. She was polished; but to my young thoughts she was cold. As I look back I do not recollect ever to have had from her one breath of summer. Although I was longing to love somebody, she did not call forth my affection; and my father was too busy to be loved. Therefore I had to expend my love on Aunt Chandler, a kind soul that was connected with our family, and the black woman that cooked, who were very kind to me. My mother that brought me up I never thought of loving. It never occurred to me. I was afraid of her. I revered her, but I was not attracted to her. I felt that she was ready to die, and that I was not. I knew that at about twilight she prayed; and I had a great shrinking from going past her door at that time. I had not the slightest doubt that she had set her affection on things above, and not on things beneath. I had the strongest conviction of her saintliness. It stamped itself upon my youth.”

Another division of influences comes under the head of spiritual:

“I can look back upon my own early life, and see how one and another took me, and how one prepared me for another. I can see how the largest natures did not always get access to me. It was late in life before my father influenced me very much. I think it was a humble woman who was in our family that first gained any considerable control over me. I feel the effect of her influence to this day.

“I next came under the influence of a very humble serving-man. He opened up new directions to me and gave me new impulses. He was a colored man; and I am not ashamed to say that my whole life, my whole career respecting the colored race in the conflict which was so long carried on in this country, was largely influenced by the effect produced on my mind, when I was between eight and ten years of age, by a poor old colored man who worked on my father’s farm, named Charles Smith. He did not set out to influence me; he did not know that he did it; I did not know it until a great while afterwards; but he gave me impulses, and impulses which were in the right direction; for he was a godly and hymn-singing man, who made wine fresh 67every night from the cluster. He used to lie upon his humble bed (I slept in the same room with him) and read his Testament, unconscious, apparently, that I was in the room; and he would laugh and talk about what he read, and chuckle over it with that peculiarly unctuous throat-tone which belongs to his race. I never had heard the Bible really read before; but there, in my presence, he read it, and talked about it to himself and to God. He turned the New Testament into living forms right before me. It was a revelation and an impulse to me.

“He talked to me about my soul more than any member of my father’s family. These things impressed me with the conviction that he was a Christian; and I never saw anything in him that led me to think otherwise. The feeling that I was sinful, that I needed to be born again, that there was such a thing as a regenerate life produced by the Spirit of God in the soul—these feelings came to me by observing the actual example of persons that I lived with more than from all other sources put together.”

But above all others for diffusive and permanent impression affecting his whole nature, bringing him into sympathy with God in all his works as in all his words, and increasing to the day of his death, was the influence of his own mother.

“The memory of my mother as one sainted has exerted a singular influence on me. After I came to be about fourteen or fifteen years of age I began to be distinctly conscious that there was a silent, secret, and, if you please to call it so, romantic influence which was affecting me. It grew and it grows, so that in some parts of my nature I think I have more communion with my mother, whom I never saw except as a child three years old, than with any living being. I am conscious that all my life long there has been a moral power in my memory of her. It is evident to me that while in education and in other material respects her death was a deprivation, it was also an inspiration, a communion—one of those invisible blessings which faith comprehends, but which we are not apt to weigh and to estimate.

“Do you know,” he says, “why so often I speak what must seem to some of you rhapsody of woman? It is because I had a mother, and if I were to live a thousand years I could not express what seems to me to be the least that I owe to her. Three years old was I when singing she left me and sung on to heaven, where she sings evermore. I have only such a remembrance of 68her as you have of the clouds of ten years ago—faint, evanescent; and yet, caught by imagination, and fed by that which I have heard of her and by what my father’s thought and feeling of her were, it has come to be so much to me that no devout Catholic ever saw so much in the Virgin Mary as I have seen in my mother, who has been a presence to me ever since I can remember; and I can never say enough for woman for my sisters’ sake, for the sake of them that have gathered in the days of my infancy around about me, in return for what they have interpreted to me of the beauty of holiness, of the fulness of love, and of the heavenliness of those elements from which we are to interpret heaven itself.”

In those influences that went to move the intellect, to awaken interest and thought, while the family life and the school and nature were all doing something, the dear old Aunt Esther with her Bible-readings and her innumerable stories and incidents of animal life stood pre-eminent and unapproachable at this period. It was but a few years before his death that he spoke of her early influence upon him, and read to us the story of Joseph as she used to read it to him, with the tears rolling down his cheeks. He told us that he had never yet been able to read that story or hear it read without crying.

But in those practical influences that had to do with life, that gave him the impression that things could be done and must be done, that gave him inspiration to labor, his father took the lead.

“What I was going to speak of was the effect upon my young mind of observing my father’s conduct under trying circumstances. I never once saw him flinch before the cold, or look as though anything was hard, or as if there was a reason for not pitching in and holding on when things were difficult. I have seen the time when we had to cut a twenty-five-foot tunnel outward from the kitchen-door, carrying the snow through the house; and such tunnels would sometimes remain a month before they would break down. I have seen the children around the house crying with cold, and slapping their hands, and stamping their feet, when father had to go and dig wood out of the snow-bank, and cut and split it; and his alacrity and vigor infused themselves into the children. I recollect particularly that if, on such nights as this, when to the high wind severe cold and thick darkness were added, my father had appointments, he always fulfilled them. 69It was customary to have preaching-places all around the neighborhood, here, there, and everywhere; and I never knew him to think of shrinking from an appointment, or holding himself back for a moment, on account of the weather. There never was a snow so deep, or a wind so high, or a rain so driving, or a night so black that the thought seemed to enter his head that he must give up a meeting. I have many times seen him, on cold, bitter nights, take out his old silk handkerchief and put it on, and go forth into the storm without seeming to dread it; and often, as I have remembered it, I have wished I could put on his spirit in the same way. He did it as a matter of course. And such was the effect of his example on his children that there was not one of them that would not be ashamed to show the ‘white feather’ in the presence of external difficulties.

“When I was a boy I learned some hymns, and committed to memory an indefinite number of texts, and waded a certain distance into the catechism, never getting through it; and I forgot them again very quickly. But I do not think all of them put together exerted any material influence upon me one way or the other—they did not remain in my mind to be understood when I was older; but a great many things which my father did, but which neither he nor anybody else spoke of, have had a strong influence on my whole life. For instance, his defying the elements, making himself master in every condition and under all circumstances, and exhibiting an indomitable pluck which did not pause nor shrink—that made a powerful impression upon me, and has been one of the reasons of the success of my life; not just here and now, but in my earlier career, when I was in the West on the frontier, and when I was very poor and had to do a great deal of rough work under circumstances of discouragement. I had an ideal of what a man should be and should do, and it stood me in stead better than any amount of catechetical instruction could have done.”

So joined these—the stepmother, the mother, the humble servant in the family, Charles Smith the happy Christian black man, Aunt Esther, and the father—hand-in-hand with nature, with the life and events that were moving on around them, and with God, in directing and moulding him in every part in these early years.

There were none of them, perhaps, unusual, certainly not unprecedented; for others besides Henry Ward Beecher have had 70heavenly-minded and large-hearted mothers; others, as well as he, have been trained in conscientiousness and have had a happy Christian example set before them, and have enjoyed the influence of fathers full of manly inspiration, while God and nature have been with and around them, and yet no such marked results have been seen as in him. Something native there was in the soil that enabled it to respond to such genial influences with such unusual fruitage. We are driven, in accounting for this, to that especial endowment that was given to him and withheld from others through the will of One who gives to every man according to His own good pleasure. “And to one He gave five talents.”

His appearance and attainments at this time are thus summed up by Mrs. Stowe: “Henry was now ten years old, a stocky, strong, well-grown boy, loyal to duty, trained in unquestioning obedience, inured to patient hard work, inured also to the hearing and discussing of all the great theological problems of Calvinism which were always reverberating in his hearing;... but as to any mechanical culture, in an extremely backward state, a poor writer, a miserable speller, with a thick utterance, and a bashful reticence which seemed like stolid stupidity....

“He was not marked out by the prophecies of partial friends for any brilliant future. He had precisely the organization which often passes for dulness in early boyhood. He had great deficiency in verbal memory—a deficiency marked in him through life. He was excessively sensitive to praise and blame, extremely diffident, and with a power of yearning, undeveloped emotions which he neither understood nor could express. His utterance was thick and indistinct, partly from bashfulness and partly from an enlargement of the tonsils of the throat, so that in speaking or reading he was with difficulty understood. In forecasting his horoscope, had any one taken the trouble then to do it, the last success that ever would have been predicted for him would have been that of an orator! ‘When Henry is sent to me with a message,’ said a good aunt, ‘I always have to make him say it three times. The first time I have no manner of an idea more than if he spoke in Choctaw; the second I catch a word now and then; by the third time I begin to understand.’”

Of the bashfulness referred to in the above he says: “We 71had our own fill of it in childhood. To walk into a room where ‘company’ was assembled, and to do it erectly and naturally, was as impossible as it would have been to fly. The sensations of sensibility were dissolving. Our back-bone grew soft, our knees lost their stiffness, the blood rushed to the head, and the sight almost left our eyes. We have known something of pain in after-years, but few pangs have been more acute than some sufferings from bashfulness in our earlier years.”

Healthy, robust, frolicksome, conscientious, obedient, loving, and efficient, but bashful in the extreme and backward in all his studies, is the summing-up that we must make of Henry Ward Beecher at this period of his life.

Boyhood—Sent to School at Bethlehem—The Widow Ingersoll’s—Failure—A Champion—Sent to Catharine Beecher’s School in Hartford—Humorous Incidents—Religious Experience.

To remedy the marked defects in his training, noticed in the preceding chapter, something must be done, or this boy will fail not only of becoming a student but of acquiring even a decent common-school education. Mr. Brace’s select school was tried for a year, but with little benefit. After a good many family discussions and some correspondence it was decided to place him in a private school in the village of Bethlehem, seven miles distant from his home, under the care of Mr. Langdon, to begin study in earnest. Of this important era, his first going from home, we have not a syllable, as we are aware, from his own pen or lips. That there was a mingled feeling of pain at leaving home, of pleasure in the novelty, and a shrinking from the new faces and the new duties, every one who remembers this epoch in his own life can readily imagine. The ride, for a large part of the distance across a broad plateau that stretched away cold and strange like the Downs of England, was well calculated to awaken that yearning sadness which was so prominent a feature of his secret experiences from childhood, and gave in part that tone of melancholy which appears so markedly in everything that we know of him at this period.

Singularly enough, he boarded with the grandmother of the one who afterwards became his son-in-law and is now aiding to write this biography. Her name was Ingersoll, and she is well described as a “large-hearted, kindly woman, a widow, living in a great, comfortable farm-house where everything was free and unconstrained.”

He was well remembered by my mother, Mrs. Martha Ingersoll Scoville, who, being somewhat older than he, had him much under her care. She said he was always a good boy about the house, 74but very bashful. “I used to feel very sorry for him, he seemed so homesick. He liked to be off by himself, wandering around in the woods, and I don’t think he studied much.”

The Ingersoll House.

This was true. Whether it was because this first separation from home brought an increase of those gloomy yearnings of heartsickness to which he was subject at times through life, or simply because of his innate dislike to the study of mere names and forms of things, that he failed to make progress in his books, no one knows. We only know on the authority of his sister, Mrs. Stowe, that “Henry’s studies were mostly with gun on shoulder roving the depths of the forest, guiltless of hitting anything because the time was lost in dreamy contemplation. Whence returning unprepared for school, he would be driven to the expedient of writing out his Latin verb and surreptitiously reading it out of the crown of his hat—an exercise from which he reaped small profit, either mentally or morally.” This was not understood at home at the time, and Dr. Beecher writes concerning him:

“Mr. Langdon has been faithful with Henry, and I trust successful; he says in a letter: ‘His observance of my regulations relating to study has become exact and punctual. His diligence all along has gradually increased, and I think he has arrived at that full purpose which will insure his making a scholar. My method of instruction for beginners is a system of extended, minute, and reiterated drilling, and the make of his mind is such as fits him to receive benefit from the operation.”

Perhaps the method of “reiterated drilling, extended and minute,” was not so well adapted to the boy as the teacher thought. At all events we have this testimony on the other side, that “after a year spent in this way it began to be perceived by the elders of the family that as to the outward and visible signs of learning he was making no progress.”

He was therefore brought home to Litchfield, leaving but one incident of his life at Bethlehem especially worthy of note. It was this: One of the older boys, having studied Tom Paine’s “Age of Reason,” was freely advocating infidel sentiments and gaining a strong and vicious influence over his companions. Young Beecher saw it and came to the rescue. He brushed up the knowledge he had already gained at the hearth-stone and table of his home, studied “Watson’s Apology,” challenged the advocate of Tom Paine’s philosophy to a debate, and, in the 75judgment of the school, gained a complete victory, proving himself thus early to be a doughty champion of the faith.

The experiment at Bethlehem having proved substantially a failure, his oldest sister, Catharine, who was then teaching a young ladies’ school in Hartford, proposed to take the boy under her care to see what she could do with him.

If his nature lay in strata, as has been said—the one a dreamy, yearning melancholy lying at the bottom, which had its full exercise in his lonely wanderings around Bethlehem; and the other, the surface one, of humor and fun—it was the latter, constantly effervescing and exploding, that appeared in his life in his sister’s school of thirty or forty girls in Hartford. The story of his arranging the umbrellas on the stairs one recess, when he was supposed to be studying grammar, so that when the outside door was opened by a late comer the whole series rushed pell-mell down into the street, greatly to the dismay of the teachers and the enjoyment of the school—with whom, of course, he was a great favorite—is well known. And one of the incidents of the recitation-room is equally familiar, but, as it is very characteristic, we give it place, copied verbatim from Mrs. Stowe:

“The school-room was divided into two divisions in grammar, under leaders on either side, and the grammatical reviews were contests for superiority in which it was vitally important that every member should be perfected. Henry was generally the latest choice, and fell on his side as an unfortunate accession, being held more amusing than profitable on such occasions.

“The fair leader of one of these divisions took the boy aside to a private apartment, to put into him with female tact and insinuation those definitions and distinctions on which the honor of the class depended.

“‘Now, Henry, a is the indefinite article, you see, and must be used only with a singular noun. You can say a man, but you can’t say a men, can you?’ ‘Yes, I can say amen, too,’ was the ready rejoinder. ‘Father says it always at the end of his prayers.’

“‘Come, Henry, now don’t be joking! Now decline he.’he.’ ‘Nominative he, possessive his, objective him.’ ‘You see his is possessive. Now, you can say his book, but you can’t say him book.’ ‘Yes, I do say hymn-book, too,’ said the impracticable scholar, with a quizzical twinkle. Each one of these sallies made 76his young teacher laugh, which was the victory he wanted. ‘But now, Henry, seriously, just attend to the active and passive voice. Now, I strike is active, you see, because if you strike you do something. But I am struck is passive, because if you are struck you don’t do anything, do you?’

“‘Yes, I do—I strike back again!’”

A letter from the afore-mentioned teacher, sent to him with her New Year’s salutation, January 1, 1858, has lately come to hand. She says, in recalling this incident: “Memory has daguerreotyped upon my mind a boy, a small specimen of perpetual motion, perpetual prank, and perpetual desire to give wrong answers to every sober grammatical rule, thereby not only overwhelming Murray but the studious gravity of a hundred school-girls.”

“Sometimes his views of philosophical subjects were offered gratuitously. Being held of rather a frisky nature, his sister appointed his seat at her elbow when she heard classes. A class in natural philosophy, not very well prepared, was stumbling through the theory of the tides. ‘I can explain that,’ said Henry. ‘Well, you see, the sun he catches hold of the moon and pulls her, and she catches hold of the sea and pulls that, and this makes the spring tides.’ ‘But what makes the neap tides?’ ‘Oh! that’s when the sun stops to spit on his hands,’ was the brisk reply.

“After about six months Henry was returned to his parents’ hands with the reputation of being an inveterate joker and an indifferent scholar. It was the opinion of his class that there was much talent lying about loosely in him, if he could only be brought to apply himself.”

Of his religious life at this time we have a glimpse in a letter written by Dr. Beecher in November, 1825:

“Our family concert of prayer was held in the study on Thanksgiving Day—your mother, Aunt Esther, Henry, and Charles. It was a most deeply solemn, tender, and interesting time.... Henry and Charles have both been awakened, and are easily affected and seriously disposed now. But as yet it is like the wind upon the willow, which rises as soon as it is passed over. It does not grapple, but the effect is good in giving power to conscience, and moral principle producing amendment in conduct.”

77This was during a revival which was then in progress in Litchfield, in which the pastor was assisted by Mr. Nettleton, the great revivalist of that period. Henry was twelve years old.

That no permanent good resulted from this work appears true, as the doctor feared, but for a reason very different from that which he gives.

Henry Ward himself tells us why it was:

“My mother—she who in the providence of God took me to her heart when my own mother had gone to see my Father in heaven, she who came after and was most faithful to the charge of the children and the household—she often took me, and prayed with me, and read me the word of God, and expounded to me the way of duty, and did all that seemed to her possible, I know, to make it easy for me to become a religious child; and yet there have been times when I think it would have been easier for me to lay my hand on a block and have it struck off than to open my thoughts to her, when I longed to open them to some one. How often have I started to go to her and tell her my feelings, when fear has caused me to sheer off and abandon my purpose! My mind would open like a rosebud, but, alas! fear would hold back the blossom. How many of my early religious pointings fell, like an over-drugged rosebud, without a blossom!”

Again, and more at length, he opens his religious experiences of the whole period:

“I remember having religious impressions, distinct and definite, as early as when I was eight or nine years of age.

“The first distinct religious feelings I had were in connection with nature. Although I was born, as far as any one can be born so, a Calvinist, and although I was conversant at a very early age with the things which pertain to Calvinism, yet, as I look back, I see that the only religious feelings or impressions I had were those which were excited in my mind through the unconscious influence of God through nature. It was not until years later that I knew it was the divine element. I yearned, I longed, for purity and nobility. I had the beginnings of the feeling of self-renunciation. I had a wistful desire that something higher, something superior to myself, should be developed out of the system of nature to help me. I had the germs of evangelical teaching; but I never spoke to anybody about them, and it seems 78to me a hermit could not have been more solitary, so far as that part of my life was concerned, than I was.

“The next thing I remember was a transition, under the influence of teaching, from the religious conditions and tendencies in my mind to a speculative state. I began to listen to sermons when I was eight or nine years old, and what seems strange is that the picturesque parts stopped not much with me; that they faded out of my mind; that the colors were not ‘fast’; but that I caught hold of the speculative parts, particularly those which were most insoluble, about which men knew least and taught most—the nature of God, the purposes of God, the scheme of divine government, not those parts which are transcendently important, namely, the elements of justice, truth, and morality commingled; that God from all eternity foreknew; that, foreknowing, he predestinated; that by predestination things were fixed, made certain; that so many as he fore-ordained to be saved would be saved, do what they would or come what might—my mind greedily seized on these, not merely as undoubted facts, as they were to me, but as having special reference to myself.

“I recollect being sometimes, as it were, behind the entrenchments of such a doctrine, and wishing I could get over them, and feeling that I would give everything in the world if I only knew that I was one of the elect, and praying that God would in some way let me know whether I was or not.

“At other times it would come in this shape: I had probably been reprimanded for a misdemeanor or a delinquency, or something of that sort. I used to be melancholy and to sit in judgment upon myself; and I remember thinking, ‘Well, it is no use for me to try to be a good boy’—not a saintly boy; that sort did not abound where I was born, and I was certainly no exception to the average run. I don’t think there are many of that kind outside of Sunday-school books. Judged by the ordinary standard, I was a very good boy. I had no vices, and no objectionable tendencies except those which sprang from robust health, buoyant spirits, and immense nerve resources. But I thought I was a base sinner. The pulpit represented all men as being sinners, and I accepted it absolutely and literally. I thought I was an awful transgressor; every little fault seemed to make a dreadful sin; and I would say to myself, ‘There! I am 79probably one of the reprobate. I have tried to be good, but I am going down. The probability is, I am not one of the elect; and what is the use of my trying? If I am not fore-ordained to be saved there is no chance for me, and I may as well go by the wholesale as by the retail.’ So sometimes on the one side and sometimes on the other these thoughts wrought upon me. Not once or twice merely, but many times, they passed through my mind. They were the sub-base, as it were, of my life. I think it was a period of fifteen or twenty years before I got relief from that undertone. It had some advantages and not a few disadvantages.

“If I had had the influence of a discreet, sympathetic Christian person to brood over and help and encourage me, I should have been a Christian child from my mother’s lap, I am persuaded; but I had no such influence. The influences of a Christian family were about me, to be sure, but they were generic; and I revolved in these speculative experiences, my strong religious habitudes taking the form of speculation all through my childhood. I recollect that from the time that I was about ten years old I began to have periods when my susceptibilities were so profoundly impressed that the outward manifestations of my nature were changed. I remember that when my brother George—who was next older than I, and who was beginning to be my helpful companion, to whom I looked up—became a Christian, being awakened and converted in college, it seemed as though a gulf had come between us, and as though he was a saint on one side of it while I was a little reprobate on the other side. It was awful to me. If there had been a total eclipse of the sun I should not have been in more profound darkness outwardly than I was inwardly. I did not know whom to go to; I did not dare to go to my father; I had no mother that I ever went to at such a time; I did not feel like going to my brother; and I did not go to anybody. I felt that I must try to wrestle out my own salvation.

“Once, on coming home, I heard the bell toll, and I learned that it was for the funeral of one of my companions with whom I had been accustomed to play, and with whom I had grown up. I did not know that he had been sick, but he had dropped into eternity; and the ringing, swinging, booming of that bell, if it had been the sound of an angel trumpet of the last day, would 80not have seemed to me more awful. I went into an ecstasy of anguish. At intervals, for days and weeks, I cried and prayed. There was scarcely a retired place in the garden, in the wood-house, in the carriage-house, or in the barn that was not a scene of my crying and praying. It was piteous that I should be in such a state of mind, and that there should be nobody to help me and lead me out into the light. I do not recollect that to that day 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. For a sinner that had repented it was thought there was pardon; but how to repent was the very thing I did not know. A converted sinner might be saved, but for a poor, miserable, faulty boy, that pouted, and got mad at his brothers and sisters, and did a great many naughty things, there was no salvation so far as I had learned. My innumerable shortcomings and misdemeanors were to my mind so many pimples that marked my terrible depravity; and I never had the remotest idea of God except that he was a Sovereign who sat with a sceptre in his hand and had his eye on me, and said: ‘I see you, and I am after you.’ So I used to live in perpetual fear and dread, and often I wished myself dead. I tried to submit and lay down the weapons of my rebellion, I tried to surrender everything; but it did not seem to do any good, and I thought it was because I did not do it right. I tried to consecrate myself to God, but all to no purpose. I did everything, so far as I could, that others did who professed to be Christians, but I did not feel any better. I passed through two or three revivals. I remember, when Mr. Nettleton was preaching in Litchfield, going to carry a note to him from father; and for a sensitive, bashful boy like me it was a severe ordeal. I went to the room where he was speaking, with the note in my trembling hand, and had to lay it on the desk beside him. Before I got half-way across the floor I was dazed and everything seemed to swim around me; but I made out to get the note to him, and he said: ‘That’s enough; go away, boy,’ and I sort of backed and stumbled toward the door (I was always stumbling and blundering in company), and sat down. He was preaching in those whispered tones which always seem louder than thunder to the conscience, although they are only whispers in the ear. He had not uttered more than three sentences before my feelings were excited, and 81the more I listened the more awful I felt; and I said to myself: ‘I will stay to the inquiry meeting.’ I heard Mr. Nettleton talk about souls writhing under conviction, and I thought my soul was writhing under conviction. I had heard father say that after persons had writhed under conviction a week or two they began to come out, and I said: ‘Perhaps I will get out’; and that thought produced in me a sort of half-exhilaration of joy. I stayed to the inquiry meeting, felt better, and trotted home with the hope that I was on the way toward conversion. I went through this revival with that hope strengthened; but it did not last long.”

It is evident from this chapter that if we would understand Henry Ward Beecher and the influences that went to the formation of his character and to the success of his life, other things than parentage, home, school, or nature must be taken into the account. The vast things of the invisible realm have begun to speak to him, and his nature has proved to be peculiarly sensitive to their influence.

He is thus early groping, unresting, and unsatisfied; but it is among mountains, and not in marshes or quicksands. Some day these mountain truths, among which he now wanders in darkness, shall be radiant in his sight with the Divine Compassion and his gloom shall give place to abiding love, joy, and peace.

Boston—Home Atmosphere—Various Experiences—Ethics rubbed in by a six-pound Shot—Discontent—Makes up his mind to go to Sea—To Study Navigation—Picture of his Life in Boston.

In the spring of 1826 Dr. Lyman Beecher moved with his family to Boston. Henry Ward was thirteen years old the following June, “a green, healthy country lad,” “with a round, full, red-cheeked face.” Here a new world opened to him and a new set of influences was brought to bear upon him.

The same home life was around him, and, if possible, more intense than ever; for Dr. Beecher had come to Boston to be the champion “of the Faith once delivered to the saints,” and he threw himself into the work with all the zeal and enthusiasm of an intensely ardent nature.

He had watched with intense interest every step of that reaction in Massachusetts from the strict theocracy of the Puritans, called the “Unitarian Controversy.” He thoroughly understood and heartily condemned the process, employed by the wealthy and literary classes, of taking away from the church, composed presumably of regenerate persons, the power to govern their own affairs and of giving it to the congregation, which was often composed of men hostile to a spiritual religion. He had seen the dominant majority enter into the possession of church edifices and church property, employ ministers opposed to the old faith, and drive the orthodox ministry out into school-houses and town-halls; and old foundations established by the fathers to perpetuate the faith had been seized and made to support opposite and antagonistic views. All this had kindled in him a burning indignation against the wrong that had been perpetrated, and a deep sympathy for the brethren who had suffered. “It was as a fire in my bones,” he said. “My mind was all the time heating, heating, heating.”

“His family prayers,” we are told by Mrs. Stowe, “at this period, departing from the customary forms of unexcited hours, became often upheavings of passionate emotion such as I shall never forget. ‘Come, Lord Jesus,’ he would say, ‘here where the 83bones of the fathers rest, here where the crown has been torn from thy brow—come and recall thy wandering children. Behold thy flock scattered on the mountains; these sheep, what have they done? Gather them, gather them, O Good Shepherd, for their feet stumble upon the dark mountains.”

Mr. Beecher in after-years spoke of the work here as something deeper than a mere dispute between rival denominations or antagonistic creeds. “The outward form of the great excitement was that of controversy between the Unitarian and Calvinistic faiths. But, as compared with the great inward reality, this was but superficial. It was broader than any doctrinal controversy, deeper than any sectarian conflict. It was a resurrection of vital religion, in all churches of every name, and in the Unitarian churches as well as the Evangelical.”

It will be seen that the same atmosphere of deep feeling and triumphant faith, if possible more tropical and more thoroughly charged with electricity, continued in the new as in the old home; but outside the family very different influences were brought to bear upon the lad, and he was led out into a much wider range of experiences. We give as many of these as space will allow.

The first thing that greatly impressed him seems to have been the bells:

“Is there any boy left in Boston to whose ears the Christ Church chimes sound as they did to mine? Some travelled persons in Litchfield had informed me that the churches in Boston were so thick that the bells on Sunday morning would almost play a tune. The first Sunday morning after the family took possession of the house in Sheafe Street, being in the back-yard, I heard in a wondrous manner the tune of ‘Greenville,’ played on bells! The whole air was full of ‘Greenville.’

“I was fully persuaded that this was the thing predicted, and that this tune simply fell into place among the vast number of bell-strokes. Too young to analyze or reason upon the matter, I listened with a pleasure and amazement which I fear nothing will ever give me again till I hear the bells ring out wondrous things in the New Jerusalem. Blessed city! in which dwelt so divine a spirit of harmony that some airy hand governed the widely scattered belfries, and taught the notes which each bell carelessly struck to come together in time and tune, and march through the air in harmony. And when, after a few minutes, the 84tune changed and ‘St. Martyn’s’ came sadly and slowly through the air, I could contain myself no longer, but rushed, red and eager, to bring out ‘Charles,’ the inseparable companion of all my marvels, who opened his great eyes with a look of amazement as utter and implicit as if he had been a young devotee witnessing his first miracle. I expounded to him the cause, taking for text the reports which had been made to me while yet in the country. Alas for marvels! The cook, overhearing, laughed us out of countenance, and explained that it was a chime of bells, and also what a chime was. Of course we were wiser and less happy. But never, in forty years, has that chime of bells sounded in my ears without bringing back, for a second, the first electric shock of wonder and pleasure.pleasure.

“Next to Boston bells were Boston ships. Here first we beheld a ship! We shall never again see anything that will so profoundly affect our imagination. We stood and gazed upon the ship, and smelt the sea-air, and looked far out along the water to the horizon, and all that we had ever read of buccaneers, of naval battles, of fleets of merchantmen, of explorations into strange seas, among rare and curious things, rose up in a cloud of mixed and changing fancies, until we scarcely knew whether we were in the body or out. How many hours have we asked and wanted no better joy than to sit at the end of the wharf, or on the deck of some newly-come ship, and rock and ride on the stream of our own unconscious imagination! We went to school in Boston Harbor.

“Next to the merchant marine was the Navy-Yard. We stole over to Charlestown almost every week. With what awe we walked past the long rows of unmounted cannon! With what exhilaration we looked forth from the mounted sea-battery that looked down the harbor, and just waited for some Britisher to dare to come in sight! We have torn any number of ships to pieces with those cannon, with imagination for our commodore and patriotism for our cannoneer. There have been great battles in Boston harbor that nobody knows anything about but ourself!”

Other experiences there were of a different nature.

The peaceful life of the quiet New England village, where each one took his place mostly by the position of the family and held it largely undisturbed, had given way to that of a city full of antagonisms and strife. It was a life not exactly in accordance 85with the instructions of a well-regulated Christian family, but its rough experiences were undoubtedly adapted to bring out some qualities that were useful in an after-career in which battle was to have so prominent a place.

“It was with some slight contempt that we beheld our first companions. Our first home was in Sheafe Street, far down at the North End, next door to Mr. Gay, the landlord. The boys thereabouts were smart and lively, but few of them could wrestle, and none of them often held out with us in a downright race. I was always long-winded, even before I began public speaking.

“In those days no boy was a good boy among his fellows who had not the courage of battle. It was the duty of all living in certain districts, upon proper occasion, to fight the boys of other streets or districts. The Salem-Streeters included all the small streets adjacent—Sheafe Street, Bennett Street, etc. When nothing else was on hand small scrimmages were gotten up between ourselves—Sheafe Street vs. Bennett Street, etc.; but we all united against Prince Street. Prince-Streeters were the natural enemies of all the surrounding streets. Yet, when the West-Enders came over in battle array, yelling, throwing stones, and driving in the timid lads caught out of bounds, all the North-Enders rose, forgot their local feuds, and went forth in awful array to chastise the wretches that lived at the West End. And if one were to believe all the feats of which we boasted for a month thereafter, he would be sure that since the days that Homer sang no such fighting had ever taken place.

“But what were all these things to that implacable and ineradical hatred which all true Boston boys entertained against Charlestown Pigs? For by such a title did we expose the meanness, the degradation, the cowardice, the utter despicableness of a boy born the other side of the ‘draw’ of the Charlestown Bridge!”

While the father was coming to leadership in the pulpit his son Henry was reaching the same point in his set by the only way opened to him at that time.

“Copp’s Hill? It recalled many a boyish prank. One sport engaged our youthful leisure. It was called ‘Follow your leader.’ It was considered as a testimony to one’s courage when, by acclamation, he was elected to leadership! The game was simple; but the results, always amusing, were sometimes somewhat 86too stimulating for pleasure. The leader started upon a run, with a long trail of boys in a line behind him, whom he endeavored to throw off by doing things which they were not strong enough or skilful or daring enough to imitate. If twenty boys started, half would drop away, after a sharp run, by mere want of breath; another section could be thrown off by some feat that terrified them.

“We recall one memorable chase. Called to the head of the column, I plunged down Margaret’s Lane, up Prince and back, up toward Copp’s Hill, reducing my followers, by sheer exhaustion, one-half. A brick house was going up; into it I dashed, ran up the ladder, walked along the floor-joists, and let myself down by a rope attached to a guy on the front. Only six or seven could follow. A large mortar-bed lay near by. I dashed into that, wading through the slush. Five came out on the other side with me. Tough five! They followed me into a shop, right back into the adjacent parlor, out at a side-door, though some of the last got the yard-stick well laid on by the indignant shop-keeper, and the last one out came dripping from a pail of water which a woman flung after ‘the nasty varmints,’ as she styled us. Many other feats did we, but in vain. The five would stick. I remember that a large part of Copp’s Hill had been dug down for filling the ‘Causeway,’ leaving a precipitous face—well, say fifty feet high to the eyes, but, if measured, perhaps twenty feet. Ascending the hill, I drew near the verge, a little hesitant to venture the plunge. But to confess that I dare not do anything would be disgraceful, and so, with but a moment’s pause, I jumped for a little crumbling foothold half-way down, and off from that, as soon as on it, to the bottom, which I reached in a heap, with dirt and stones and two boys following after! Not stopping to rub my shins, rejoicing that only two were left, and desperate, I took my way to the near wharf where ‘Billy Gray’s’ ships used to be, climbed the side, ran along the deck, up the bowsprit, far out, and then, with a spring, off into deep water! Down, down, down we went, and seemed likely to go on for ever. At length the descent stopped, and we rose again to the surface—O joy!—to see the two boys standing on the bowsprit! They did not dare! That day’s work established our reputation! We know how Alexander felt! Cæsar and Napoleon can tell us nothing new about the glories of victory!”

87That his country honesty was not altogether proof against the temptations of his life in the city is shown by a description he gives, in “Eyes and Ears,” of his successful attempt to purloin a six-pound cannon-ball from the Navy-Yard:

“One day I visited some ill-constructed vaults where shot had been stored. The six and twelve pound shot were extremely tempting. I had no particular use for them. I am to this day puzzled to know why I coveted them. There was no chance in the house to roll them, and as little in the street. For base-ball or shinty they were altogether too substantial. But I was seized with an irresistible desire to possess one. As I had been well brought up, of course the first objection arose on the score of stealing. But I disposed of that, with a patriotic facility that ought long before this to have sent me to Congress, by the plea that it was no sin to steal from the government. Next, how should I convey the shot from the Yard without detection? I tried it in my handkerchief. That was altogether too plain. I tried my jacket-pocket, but the sag and shape of that alarmed my fears. I tried my breeches-pocket, but the abrupt protuberance was worse than all. I had a good mind to be honest, since there was no feasible way of carrying it off. At length a thought struck me: Wrap a handkerchief about it and put it in your hat.

“The iron ball was accordingly swaddled with the handkerchief and mounted on my head, and the hat shut over it. I emerged from the vault a little less courageous than was pleasant, and began my march toward the gate. Every step seemed a mile. Every man I met looked unusually hard at me. The marines evidently were suspecting my hat. Some sailors, leering and rolling toward the ships, seemed to look me through. The perspiration stood all over my face as an officer came toward me. Now for it! I was to be arrested, put in prison, cat-o’-nine-tailed, or shot, for aught I knew. I wished the ball in the bottom of the sea; but no, it was on the top of my head!

“By this time, too, it had grown very heavy; I must have made a mistake in selecting! I meant a six-pounder, but I was sure it must have been a twelve-pounder, and before I got out of the Yard it weighed twenty-four pounds! I began to fear that the stiffness with which I carried my neck would excite suspicion, and so I tried to limber up a little, which had nearly ruined me, for 88the shot took a roll around my crown in a manner that liked to have brought me and my hat to the ground. Indeed, I felt like a loaded cannon, and every man and everything was like a spark trying to touch me off. The gate was a great way farther off than I had ever found it before; I seemed likely never to get there.

“And when at length, heartsore and headsore, with my scalp well rolled, I got to the gate, all my terror came to a culmination as the sentinel stopped his marching, drew himself up, and, looking through me, smiled. I expected him to say: ‘O you little thievish devil, do you think I do not see through you?’ But, bless his heart! he only said: ‘Pass!’ He did not say it twice. I walked a few steps farther, and then, having great faith in the bravery of my feet, I pulled my hat off before me, and, carrying it in that position, I whipped around the first corner and made for the bridge with a speed which Flora Temple would envy.

“When I reached home I had nothing to do with my shot. I did not dare show it in the house nor tell where I got it; and after one or two solitary rolls I gave it away on the same day to a Prince-Streeter.

“But, after all, that six-pounder rolled a good deal of sense into my skull. I think it was the last thing I ever stole (excepting a little matter of a heart now and then), and it gave me a notion of the folly of coveting more than you can enjoy, which has made my whole life happier. It was rather a severe mode of catechising, but ethics rubbed in with a six-pound shot are better than none at all.”

His student life, which had been such a failure heretofore, was improved a little, and but a little. By means of the pressure of school discipline, backed up and made formidable by family pride and the advice and exhortations heard at home, he managed to make fair progress in most of his studies, especially in the rules and exceptions of the Latin grammar, and to the day of his death was able to establish his claims to proficiency in that language by rattling off the list of eleven prepositions that govern the ablative. But his heart was not in the work. Disgust, insurrection, revolution, was the stormy way along which he was rapidly travelling.

This period in his own life is described in “Norwood”: “Long before the Amazon reaches the ocean it has grown so 89wide that from the channel no shore can be seen from either side. It is still a river, but with all the signs and symptoms of becoming an ocean. There is a period, beginning not far from fourteen, in young lives, when childhood is widened suddenly, and carries its banks so far out that manhood seems begun, though as yet it is far off. The stream is ocean-deep. Upon this estuary of youth the currents are shifting, the eddies are many. Here are united the strength of the sea and the hindrances of the land.

“The important organic changes which, in our zone, take place in the second full seven of years, produce important results even in the coldest temperaments and in the slenderest natures. But in persons of vigor of body and strength of feeling there is frequently an uprising like a city in insurrection. The young nature, swelling to the new influences with a sense of unmeasurable strength, sometimes turbulent with passions, but always throbbing with excited feelings led on and fed by tantalizing fancies, seems transformed from its previous self and becomes a new nature. New moral forces are developed into activity. Aspirations begin to quicken the soul. Ambitions grow nobler.”

Mrs. Stowe says: “The era of fermentation and development was upon him, and the melancholy that had brooded over his childhood waxed more turbulent and formidable. He grew gloomy and moody, restless and irritable. His father, noticing the change, got him on a course of biographical reading, hoping to divert his thoughts. He began to read naval histories, the lives of great sailors and commanders, the voyages of Captain Cook, the biography of Nelson; and immediately, like lightning flashing out of rolling clouds, came the determination not to rest any longer in Boston, learning terminations and prepositions, but to go forth to a life of enterprise. He made up his little bundle, walked the wharf and talked with sailors and captains, hovered irresolute on the verge of voyages, never quite able to grieve his father by a sudden departure. At last he wrote a letter announcing to a brother that he could and would no longer remain at school; that he had made up his mind for the sea; that if not permitted to go he should go without permission. This letter was designedly dropped where his father picked it up. Dr. Beecher put it in his pocket and said nothing for the moment, but the next day asked Henry to help him saw wood. 90Now, the wood-pile was the doctor’s favorite debating-ground, and Henry felt complimented by the invitation, as implying manly companionship.

“‘Let us see,’ said the doctor, ‘Henry, how old are you?’ ‘Almost fourteen!’ ‘Bless me! How boys do grow! Why, it’s almost time to be thinking what you are going to do. Have you ever thought?’ ‘Yes; I want to go to sea.’ ‘To sea! Of all things! Well, well! After all, why not? Of course you don’t want to be a common sailor. You want to get into the navy?’ ‘Yes, sir; that’s what I want.’ ‘But not merely as a common sailor, I suppose?’ ‘No, sir; I want to be a midshipman, and after that a commodore.’ ‘I see,’ said the doctor cheerfully. ‘Well, Henry, in order for that, you know, you must begin a course of mathematics and study navigation and all that.’ ‘Yes, sir; I am ready.’ ‘Well, then, I will send you up to Amherst next week, to Mount Pleasant, and then you’ll begin your preparatory studies, and if you are well prepared I presume I can make interest to get you an appointment.’”

And so he went to Mount Pleasant, in Amherst, Mass., and Dr. Beecher said shrewdly: “I shall have that boy in the ministry yet.”

In a sermon preached by his brother, Rev. T. K. Beecher, we have this picture:

“All of you know more about ‘Henry Ward Beecher’ than I do, but I know more about ‘Brother Henry’ than you do.

“A little Boston boy five years old had a brother Henry who was sixteen, and a brother Charles who was fourteen; and though he knew of David and Goliath, who ‘fell down slambang,’ and David, ‘little David ran up and cut his head off’! though he knew about Samson and the lion, yet for the present strength and greatness Henry and Charles were his heroes. Did they not own a long sled and coast down Copp’s Hill and jump sixteen sleds at the bounce? Did they not sharpen skates with enthusiasm and go off to the mill-dam alone?

“By night when the tocsin rang and the little boy covered his head and shivered under the sheets, did not Henry and Charles rush down two flights of stairs and out the door, yelling fire? And they were at school fitting for college at Mt. Pleasant. Their hair-trunk was two days a-packing, and the stage took them away before daylight, leaving the house so quiet and so 91empty. Sixteen and five—oh! how magnificent the boy of sixteen to the little boy of five. I speak of brother Henry.

“But at prayers, family prayers, Henry and Charles could sing, and so could the little boy. A frail, blue-eyed, willowy mother sat in the rocking-chair. Father would read—the little boy knew not what. But for the singing from village hymns Henry sometimes fluted, making a queer mouth; and then, all kneeling, it was ever asked by father, ‘Overturn and overturn, till He whose right it is shall come and reign, King of nations as King of saints.’

“Prayers over, Aunt Esther and the little boy, he standing in a chair, washed the dishes, and Henry and Charles stormed out to the Latin School. But they went to Mount Pleasant, and Mr. Colton was the teacher. Twice a year they came home, at Thanksgiving and the summer vacation. The expected stage drove up, and the little boy, in agony of delight that could not be endured, hid himself on a trundle-bed under mother’s and braided bed-cords till, searched out, he was tossed above the clouds by great, strong brother Henry.

“At morning prayers, ‘Thou hast brought back our boys in health,’ the little boy heard that and the ‘overturn and overturn’ part; and that little boy, now your pastor, bears witness in your ears that the boys were kept, and that since those days there have been overturnings not a few. And further he tells you that those family prayers propagated the ancestral religion in brother Henry, though they have failed to hand down the ancestral theology.

“The boys must go to college, and leave the little boy to go to infant school, to Miss Bull, and learn to tell the hour on a card clock, and add, subtract, and count with an abacus. Henry in the world of departed spirits, Amherst; Charles at Bowdoin. Every morning father praying for our boys at college: ‘May they become good ministers of our Lord Jesus Christ!’

”... Edward was a man, like father. But Henry and Charles were heroes, doing things. How they could jump! How they whirled around the horizontal bar! How Charles could flog a top! And Henry had peanuts and red peppermints. Shall I ever be big and do things, and run to fires, and go way down Milk Street?

“Yes, one vacation brother Henry took the little boy down 92on Milk Street, past two Unitarian churches safely, past Tremont Theatre, past an open stable-door where lay a red cow with monstrous horns, chewing her big mouth with nothing in it, and looking, oh! so strong and hungry at that little boy. But Henry wasn’t scared. He was whistling. ‘Come along, Tom,’ he said, ‘that’s only a cow.’

“Henry and Charles at college; father and eight of us staging from Boston to Cincinnati, leaving my heroes. Amherst and Bowdoin loom large in my fancy still. My heroes were to stay and grow! Tidings once a month: Charles has a fiddle, Henry has a six-keyed flute; Charles, and something about circles and geometry; Henry, and phrenology and temperance lectures.”

Such was his life in Boston, undoubtedly to a certain extent beneficial, and, by reason of the activity of the streets of the city and the bustle of the wharves, attractive. But coming at the turbulent period of his own development, when the rough elements of its thoroughfares were more congenial to him than the influences of its churches, libraries, or homes, it was far from being satisfactory. Its liberty was not altogether safe, nor were its restrictions healthful; and he says: “I cannot see how, if I had remained much longer in Boston, I could have escaped ruin.” We see him, therefore, start off on the lumbering stage-coach, in the early autumn morning before daylight, for Amherst, with a sense of relief and hearty thankfulness that he is escaped as a bird from the snare of the fowler.

School-Life at Mount Pleasant—Mathematics—Elocution—Testimony of Classmates—Religious Experiences—Troubles—A Romantic Friendship—Another Kind—Letter of Reminiscence—A Royal School-boy.

It was in 1827, and Henry was fourteen years old, when he entered the Mount Pleasant Institute. “He was admitted to the institution at a price about half the usual charge, for one hundred dollars per year.” “His appearance was robust and healthy, rather inclined to fulness of form, with a slight pink tinge on his cheeks and a frequent smile upon his face. In his manners and communications he was quiet, orderly, and respectful. He was a good-looking youth.” This is the testimony of one of his teachers, Mr. George Montague.

“I think he must have been fond of children, for he was always ready for a frolic with me. I don’t remember how he spoke, except that he talked a good deal and was full of life and fun.” So says a friend, in whose home he boarded, in a letter written during the past year.

No place could have been better fitted to the condition of the boy, as he then was, than the one chosen. He was tired of the city with its brick walls, stone pavements, and artificial restrictions, and longed for the freedom and the freshness of the country. Amherst at that time was only a small village, fighting back with indifferent success the country that pressed in upon it from every side, and offering this city-sick lad, almost within a stone’s throw of the school, the same kind of fields and forests that were around him at Litchfield, and spreading out for him a landscape equal in beauty to that of his childhood home.

Besides, he has an object in view that stirs his blood. He is to fit himself for the navy; his father has promised his influence to get him an appointment, if wanted, and Admiral Nelson and all other brave admirals and commodores are his models. For the first time in his life he takes hold of study with enthusiasm.

The institution was very popular in its day, and a great 94advance upon the old academy. It was semi-military in its methods, and in its government there was great thoroughness without severity. Its teachers possessed superior qualifications, and all were men of great kindness as well as of marked ability. Among them were two men who especially had great influence in directing his energies and preparing him not only for Amherst College but for the greater work beyond, and who were ever remembered by him with the deepest gratitude.

The first of these was W. P. Fitzgerald, the teacher of mathematics at Mount Pleasant school:

“He taught me to conquer in studying. There is a very hour in which a young nature, tugging, discouraged, and weary with books, rises with the consciousness of victorious power into masterhood. For ever after he knows that he can learn anything if he pleases. It is a distinct intellectual ‘conversion.’

“I first went to the blackboard, uncertain, soft, full of whimpering. ‘That lesson must be learned,’ he said, in a very quiet tone, but with a terrible intensity and with the certainty of Fate. All explanations and excuses he trod under foot with utter scornfulness. ‘I want that problem. I don’t want any reasons why I don’t get it.’

“‘I did study it two hours.’

“‘That’s nothing to me; I want the lesson. You need not study it at all, or you may study it ten hours—just to suit yourself. I want the lesson. Underwood, go to the blackboard!’

“‘Oh! yes, but Underwood got somebody to show him his lesson.’

“‘What do I care how you get it? That’s your business. But you must have it.’

“It was tough for a green boy, but it seasoned him. In less than a month I had the most intense sense of intellectual independence and courage to defend my recitations.

“In the midst of a lesson his cold and calm voice would fall upon me in the midst of a demonstration—‘No!’ I hesitated, stopped, and then went back to the beginning; and, on reaching the same spot again, ‘No!’ uttered with the tone of perfect conviction, barred my progress. ‘The next!’ and I sat down in red confusion. He too was stopped with ‘No!’ but went right on, finished, and, as he sat down, was rewarded with, ‘Very well.’

95“‘Why,’ whimpered I, ‘I recited it just as he did, and you said No!’

“‘Why didn’t you say Yes, and stick to it? It is not enough to know your lesson. You must know that you know it. You have learned nothing till you are sure. If all the world says No, your business is to say Yes and to prove it!’”

The other helper of this period was John E. Lovell.

In a column of the Christian Union of July 14, 1880, devoted to “Inquiring Friends,” appeared this question with the accompanying answer:

“I had from childhood a thickness of speech arising from a large palate, so that when a boy I used to be laughed at for talking as if I had pudding in my mouth. When I went to Amherst I was fortunate in passing into the hands of John Lovell, a teacher of elocution, and a better teacher for my purpose I cannot conceive. His system consisted in drill, or the thorough practice of inflexions by the voice, of gesture, posture, and articulation. Sometimes I was a whole hour practising my voice on a word—like ‘justice.’ I would have to take a posture, frequently at a mark chalked on the floor. Then we would go through all the gestures, exercising each movement of the arm and the throwing open the hand. All gestures except those of precision go in curves, the arm rising from the side, coming to the front, turning to the left or right. I was drilled as to how far the arm should come forward, where it should start from, how far go back, and under what circumstances these movements should be made. It was drill, drill, drill, until the motions almost became a second nature. Now I never know what movements I shall make. My gestures are natural, because this drill made them natural to me. The only method of acquiring an effective education is by practice, of not less than an hour a day, until the student has his voice and himself thoroughly subdued and trained to right expression.

Mr. Montague says: “Mr. Beecher submitted to Mr. Lovell’s 96drilling and training with a patience which proved his interest in the study to be great. The piece which was to be spoken was committed to memory from Mr. Lovell’s mouth, the pupil standing on the stage before him, and every sentence and word, accent and pronunciation, position and movement of the body, glance of the eye and tone of voice, all were subjects of study and criticism. And day after day, often for several weeks in continuance, Mr. Beecher submitted to this drilling upon the same piece, until his teacher pronounced him perfect.”

His dramatic power was displayed and noted at this early period. Dr. Thomas Field, a classmate in the school, says: “One incident occurred during our residence in Mount Pleasant which left an abiding impression on my mind. At the exhibition at the close of the year, either 1828 or 1829, the drama of ‘William Tell’ was performed by some of the students, and your father took the part of the tyrant Gessler. Although sixty years have passed, I think now, as I thought then, that it was the most impressive performance I ever witnessed.”

His love of flowers was so marked as to attract the attention of a gardener in the village, who gave him the use of a plot of ground where he might sow and plant what he chose; and here the boy spent many a play-hour in digging, sowing, and weeding, that he might enjoy the beauty which his own hand had been instrumental in producing. “In this garden-corner the chaplain of Mount Pleasant Institute found him one day lost in admiration for the opening buds and beautiful blossoms that were unfolding under his culture, and could not forbear to improve the opportunityopportunity and administer a gentle rebuke to the enthusiastic youth. ‘Ah! Henry,’ he said, ‘these things are pretty, very pretty, but, my boy, do you think that such things are worthy to occupy the attention of a man who has an immortal soul?’” The boy was abashed before so much dignity, and, we may add, stupidity, and assuming the stolid look that his bashfulness had made natural, at this time, under such circumstances, went on with his work among the flowers; but he said afterwards that he wanted to tell him that “since Almighty God had taken time to make these trifles, it did not seem amiss for him to take time to look at them.” So, now a youth, he is walking as when a child among flowers, and the leader of the boys in their most venturesome sports is kneeling in adoring silence over beds of pansies and 97asters, and feeding the hunger of his soul with the beauty of their forms and colors.

In a letter dated December 24, 1828, addressed to his sister Harriet—the first that has come to our hands from Mount Pleasant—he gives some account of his manner of life at school, and various experiences:

His religious experience, of which we have heard nothing since he left Litchfield, the life in Boston apparently not being 98very favorable to it, again attracts our attention at this point. He says:

“When I was fourteen years of age I left Boston and went to Mount Pleasant. There broke out while I was there one of those infectious religious revivals which have no basis of judicious instruction, but spring from inexperienced zeal. It resulted in many mushroom hopes, and I had one of them; but I do not know how or why I was converted. I only know I was in a sort of day-dream, in which I hoped I had given myself to Christ.

“I wrote to father expressing this hope; he was overjoyed, and sent me a long, kind letter on the subject. But in the course of three or four weeks I was nearly over it; and I never shall forget how I felt, not long afterward, when a letter from father was handed me in which he said I must anticipate my vacation a week or two and come home and join the Church on the next Communion Sabbath. The serious feelings I had were well-nigh gone, and I was beginning to feel quite jolly again, and I did not know what to do. I went home, however, and let them take me into the Church. A kind of pride and shamefacedness kept me from saying I did not think I was a Christian, and so I was made a church-member.”

In an editorial in the Independent, written in 1862, upon the disbanding of this old church, the Bowdoin Street—originally Hanover Street—Church, Boston, he describes this event:

“If somebody will look in the old records of Hanover Street church about 1829 they will find a name there of a boy about fifteen years old who was brought into the Church on a sympathetic wave, and who well remembers how cold and almost paralyzed he felt while the committee questioned him about his ‘hope’ and ‘evidences,’ which, upon review, amounted to this: that the son of such a father ought to be a good and pious boy. Being tender-hearted and quick to respond to moral sympathy, he had been caught and inflamed in a school excitement, but was just getting over it when summoned to Boston to join the church! On the morning of the day he went to church without seeing anything he looked at. He heard his name called from the pulpit among many others, and trembled; rose up with every emotion petrified; counted the spots on the carpet; looked piteously up at the cornice; heard the fans creak in the pews near him; felt thankful to a fly that lit on his face, as if something familiar at 99last had come to break an awful trance; heard faintly a reading of the Articles of Faith; wondered whether he should be struck dead for not feeling more—whether he should go to hell for touching the bread and wine, that he did not dare to take nor to refuse; spent the morning service uncertain whether dreaming, or out of the body, or in a trance; and at last walked home crying, and wishing he knew what, now that he was a Christian, he should do, and how he was to do it. Ah! well, there is a world of things in children’s minds that grown-up people do not imagine, though they too once were young.”

Unsatisfactory in many respects as was his religious experience, it seems to have been powerful enough to change his whole ideal of life. We hear no more of his becoming a sailor. He appears to have yielded to the inevitable, and henceforth studies with the ministry in view.

That there was awakened in him a strong sense of duty and a deep earnestness of purpose appears from a letter written from the school to his brother Edward:

In another one to the same, dated August, 1829, he says:

The following letter, written near the close of his school-life, affords a view of some of his troubles, and is given entire:

Occasionally in some moment of frolicsome reminiscence he would tell one of his grandchildren of another kind of experience that belonged to these days. Bashful as he was and retiring by nature, he was not by any means proof against the tender passion—in fact, such a nature as his was just the one that its arrows would reach the earliest, and into which they would strike deepest.

She was the sister of a schoolmate, and her name was Nancy. All this vacation he had developed great fondness for this school friend; was often at his house. “And there,” he said, “I would lean against the window and watch Nancy sew, she had such little pink fingers—how I wanted to take hold of them! And then once in a while she would just glance up, and I would be covered with hot and awkward confusion.”

On one evening in particular he had spruced up his dress and screwed up his courage preparatory to making an evening call, when, as the family sat around the fire, “Lyman,” said the mother, without looking up from her lace knitting, “Mount Pleasant is an excellent school. Henry is improving very much. He has grown tidy, blacks his boots and brushes his hair, and begins to pay a proper attention to his clothes.”

“At this point,” says Mr. Beecher, in telling the story, “Charles gave an explosive giggle and punched me slyly. Father lowered his newspaper; glancing over his glasses in our direction, seeing me covered with confusion and Charles full of suppressed laughter, said dryly:

“‘Oh! it is the school, is it? Humph! I guess the cause is nearer home.’”

“How did it turn out, grandpa?”

104“Oh! she was older than I, and married another fellow soon after. A short time ago, after a lecture in Boston, a little old lady introduced herself to me as ‘Nancy ———.’ But the charm was gone. I shook the once tempting hand and felt neither awkward nor hot.”

To some of his letters of this school-boy era he signs the initials H. C. B. instead of H. W. B. The adoption of this letter C came about from that enthusiasm of friendship which was always one of his marked characteristics. The following is the history of the matter:

On the back of a sheet of letter-paper which we have before us, folded as if for filing, is written:

Opening it we read:

The explanation of this singular paper is found in a very romantic history and friendship.

Constantine Fontellachi was a Greek from the island of Scio, in the Grecian Archipelago. His parents were killed by the Turks in that terrible massacre of the Sciotese which horrified the world in 1822. Constantine, who was six or eight years old, escaped and hid among the rocks upon the coast until he was discovered and taken off by a coasting vessel. He made his way to the New World and was adopted by Mrs. Newell, of Amherst, as her own, and sent to the Mount Pleasant school. His romantic but sorrowful history, his great beauty and grace of person, captivated Henry Ward; as he said: “He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. He was like a young 106Greek god. When we boys used to go swimming together I would climb out on the bank to watch Constantine swim, he was so powerful, so beautiful.”

The brightness of his intellect and his kindliness of heart were equal to the beauty of his person, and the admiration excited deepened into the warmest and most sincere affection. It was like that between David and Jonathan, and appears to have been mutual.

When they separated at the close of their school-days, one to enter college and the other to go into business in Boston, the above covenant was written, admirable only as it illustrates what has been called Mr. Beecher’s genius for friendship. Returning to his native land in 1842, Constantine died very suddenly of cholera. But even then the old friendship was not forgotten. Years after Mr. Beecher gave to one of his sons “Constantine” as a middle name, that he might have in his family one who should always remind him of the friend so greatly beloved.

We close this chapter with a letter of reminiscence of Mount Pleasant days.

For the benefit of all school-boys we call attention to some of the most marked features of this period in the life of H. W. Beecher, as they appear from the extracts given and from other papers for which we have no space. He was healthy and robust, a favorite among the boys upon the play-ground, who called him “Hank” Beecher. He was a leader in their sports, and at the same time a champion of the younger and weaker boys. He learned to master his work, and by drill in school-room and gymnasium gained control of his own powers of body and mind. He kept his eyes open to the beauty of the world around him, and was very susceptible to the attractions of fair faces as well. He was open and manly in following his religious convictions, clean-mouthed and pure-hearted in his morals. He pondered big matters, and asked large questions, and sought out satisfactory conclusions for himself and for his companions. He looked for information in all directions, and took great pains to store it away for future use. He read good books and a great many of them, and the novels he read were of the best kind. Withal he was a “hail-fellow-well-met” companion and a most devoted and faithful friend. Upon the authority of every word of testimony we have been able to get from teachers, classmates, and old residents of the town, we declare him to have been a royal school-boy, whose manly faithfulness, kindly service, stalwart morality, and loving, cheerful friendliness prepared him for the grand life which he afterwards lived and the great success which he achieved, and make him a worthy example for all the ingenuous, aspiring youth of our land.

Amherst College—Private Journal—Testimony of Classmates—Tutor’s Delight—Begins his Anti-Slavery Career—Spiritual Darkness—Engagement—Letters of his Mother—Experiences in Teaching School—First Sermons—Lecturing—His Reading—The Record.

Henry Ward Beecher entered Amherst College in 1830 in a class of forty members. Although prepared for the Sophomore year, yet, following the advice of his father, he entered as a Freshman in the class of ’34. On the cover of a very commonplace-looking copy-book, brown and yellow with age, which we have in our possession, he has written with a great many flourishes “Private Journal,” and then has added with equal emphasis, “Not to be looked into.” But since he afterwards drew his pen through both clauses, we have taken the liberty not only to look but also to make extracts from its contents.

The pages appear to have been written for the most part with reference to a correspondence which he was then carrying on with his brother Charles, referred to in the previous chapter, many of the questions being apparently argued, and incidents in the diary noted with him in view. As a whole it forms a rather odd mixture of excellent sentiments, religious doctrines, questions and arguments, studied illustrations and daily incidents, showing an alert mind, and one that, while awake to observe the smallest events, was equally ready to grapple with the largest subjects. A list of eleven “Tracts French” on half the first page is followed on the blank spaces of the remainder with careless pen-scrawls in which the name of “Nancy” appears with attempts at monograms, showing the pleasant fancies that possessed his idle moments.

“Tracts English” heads the next page, which is ruled for names and numbers; but for some reason, perhaps because the list was too great or the selection too difficult, the plan was never carried out and not a single entry was made—a failure so human, so common, that it at once brings him into the sympathies of thousands who remember how often they have done the same thing.

“Occasional Thoughts” comes next, printed with the pen in 110small caps in the middle of a page, and surrounded with the usual artistic pen-decorations. On the opposite page the thoughts begin. The first is “Proof of a Hell.” “I prove first that there must be a hell, and then it will appear evident that there must be a judgment.” Six pages of proof-texts and argument follow, when we come to the next question: “Who will enjoy heaven most?” When this has been answered, somewhat more briefly than the former, but apparently to his own satisfaction, he opens the next subject:

“I wish to ask you [evidently addressed to his brother], not as a question, but for my own information, what you think about the devil? Now, this of itself is quite a curious question, but what I wish to ask in this particular is, Do you think that he is at all under the divine direction as we are?”

Several pages of pithy sayings and illustrations follow, of which the first three are fair samples:

“God’s plans are like a hive of bees, for they seem to go on without any order till they are accomplished, but then you can see a great plan. Each one seems to be pursuing something for itself, but, like the bees, they at the end help to form one elegant edifice.”

“A half-way Christian has too little piety to be happy in the next world, and too much to be happy in this.”

“Religion, like fire, will go out nearly as soon if no fuel is added to it as if water is poured on it.”

These are not quotations, but original, and show thus early a habit already formed and a power already being educated of illustrating religious truth by natural objects and processes.

The last half of the book is used as a diary, written mostly with a lead-pencil, and opens with an account of his journey from Boston to Hartford on his way to enter college:

“I started from Boston Tuesday eve at ten o’clock, and, riding all night, I arrived in Hartford in time to dine. I took passage in the United States mail-stage. It can hold but six passengers inside, it being made light in order to travel fast. I think that we travelled very fast, for we went one hundred miles in about fifteen hours. After I got into Hartford I started off to find Mary. I went to her house, and sent word that I wished to see Mrs. Perkins. After waiting awhile she came down-stairs, and did not know me, and I had to tell her who I was. About five 111o’clock I went to see Harriet and Catharine. Catharine knew me, but Harriet did not. She could not think what to make of it when I went up and kissed her.

“I shall now begin my journal:

“Catharine wishes me to go to her levée to-night. Don’t want to much, but conclude that I will. Went before any of the company came. Went into Catharine’s room and sat till it was time to go down. The company began to come in, at first ladies, like flocks of pigeons, stringing along through the parlors; soon also the gentlemen began to come in. In the meantime I was sitting by the side of the pianoforte, alone and ‘unbefriended,’ looking at the different groups of persons talking. At length Harriet came and sat down by me, and I had quite a talk; but she wishing me to go with her into the other parlor, where a great many young ladies and no gentlemen were sitting, I refused, whereupon she kept pressing me, till at length, when she got up to go and speak with some one on the other side of the room, I seized the opportunity, and very quickly started for the door, but unluckily ran against a gentleman, knocked him half-over, made an apology, and got into the entry. Nor did my scrape end here; for, getting my hat, I perceived that they saw me from the parlors, and, getting the other side of the entry to hide myself from them, I espied six or seven young ladies seated on the stairs, watching to see what I was a-going to do. Well, I went back to the table where I had taken my hat, and from there whipped out of the door. After I had got home I sat and talked with Aunt Esther and Mary for a few moments, and then I went out to get a lamp. The stairs, I thought, were in this shape:

but instead of that they were in this way:

112You know when they are moved round in that way there are four or five steps that meet in one point, a, and branch at b, so you cannot step on them except at b. Well, I stepped down at a and fell five stairs head-first—stretching my hands forward saved my cranium—and tumbled the rest of the way, to the no small annoyance of my shins and knees. So much for running away from the levée.”

“Catharine and Harriet came to tea, after which I went home with them, when Harriet put her curls on to my head and her bonnet, Catharine a cloak and neck-handkerchief, and then called the young ladies in, and they all thought that I was Harriet; and then, to cap all, Harriet put on a man’s cloak and my hat, and she looked exactly like you [Charles]!”

Such was Henry Ward Beecher at the age of seventeen, on the eve of entering college—bashful, smooth-faced, and changing rapidly in appearance, so that his own sisters did not know him. The penmanship shows as yet an unformed hand, but in its main features is like that of a later date.

He carelessly leaves out a word or a letter here and there, and markedly in places continues the old habit of his early school days—poor spelling. Nothing appears that indicates any talent superior to the majority of young men on their way to college, unless it be a certain enthusiasm, straightforwardness, and simplicity.

The college at this time was but nine years old, having been established in 1821. Rev. Heman Humphrey was president. It was small and poorly endowed, as well as young, but the chairs of instruction were ably filled; and since it had been founded by the orthodox Congregationalists as, in fact, an antidote to the Unitarianism of Harvard, and with especial reference to the education of young men for the ministry, its orthodoxy was unquestioned and its religious spirit pronounced and active.

By reason of his excellent preparation and the admirable mental training he had received, either of two courses were open to Henry Ward. He might aspire to lead his class in scholarship, become a “high-honor” man, and possibly take the valedictory, or use the time which he had at his disposal in following out those studies and readings that were to his taste.

He chose the latter, and, while giving sufficient study to the college course to preserve a respectable standing in his class, 113gave his greatest effort to carrying out his own plan of development and culture.

“I had acquired by the Latin and mathematics the power of study,” he says. “I knew how to study, and I turned it upon things I wanted to know.”

The beauty of the Greek and Latin classics did not attract him; it seemed cold and far away, belonging to another time and another order of mind; but our English classics, with their warmth of feeling, their lofty imagination, their delicate sentiment, their power and eloquence, seemed akin and near to him; they had to do with the present, and he gave himself to their study with a whole-hearted enthusiasm that rendered him peculiarly open to their influences.

Inspired and fed by them as to what to say, he also gave especial attention to the manner of saying it. Rhetoric and oratory were diligently pursued throughout his college course. In these departments he seems, according to the testimony of his class and college mates, to have excelled then almost as markedly as he has since.

Says Dr. Thomas P. Field: “The first thing I particularly remember about him in college was this: I went into our class prayer-meeting on Saturday evening, and young Beecher gave an exhortation. He urged us to a higher life and more constant activity in religious work. I heard him a great many times after he became a famous preacher, but I think I never was more moved by his eloquence than in that boys’ prayer-meeting. In the regular routine of our studies I always was aroused and astonished by his extemporaneous debates. He surpassed all the rest of us then in extemporaneous power of speech as much as he did in his after-life. There was where he seemed to me particularly to excel as a student. In mere recitation of mathematics or languages many of us could surpass him, but in extemporaneous debates he could beat us all. I was always greatly interested, too, in his written essays. We were in the habit of reading our essays to the professors in the class-room. Your father always had something to say that was fresh and striking and out of the beaten track of thought—something, too, that he had not gotten from books, but that was the product of his own thinking.”

Dr. John Haven, another classmate, says of him: “He was a 114great reader, and probably had more general knowledge than any one of his classmates when he graduated.”

Says Lewis Tappan, a classmate: “In logic and class debates no one could approach him. I listened to his flow of impassioned eloquence in those my youthful days with wonder and admiration.”

S. Hopkins Emery, another classmate, in answer to a letter, writes: “Nobody could be gloomy or desponding near your father. He made us all cheerful and happy. Do I remember him in college? Indeed I do—more than I have time to write or you patience, perhaps, to read. It seems but yesterday that I was reading a composition in the lecture-room of Professor Worcester. Beecher sat just behind me. I had finished reading, when I heard a friendly whisper in my ear: ‘Emery, your porch is too large for the house.’ It was a good criticism. In such college studies which had to do with writing and speaking the English language your father excelled. The dead languages and mathematics never seemed to suit his taste. He might have excelled in them if he had been so minded. He was equal to anything he undertook. No one was his match in extemporaneous talk or debate.”

This power and its exercise upon one memorable occasion was fraught, according to a college mate, Rev. S. W. Hanks, with very marked consequences:

“In the annual Sophomore and Freshman fray the former found themselves engaged with a force that was more than a match for them, and their pranks upon the Freshmen got repaid with much more than the usual interest. In consequence of this a meeting of all the classes in college was held to protest against the barbarities of this customary war, in which the smoke of the battle usually found its way into the Freshmen’s rooms. At this meeting a leading member of the Junior class, finding the Sophomores a little wanting in courage and speaking talent, volunteered to act as their attorney, and made a telling and crushing speech against the Freshmen class for their hard handling of the Sophomores, who had only followed an old custom in their treatment of the Freshmen. At the close of this speech by the ‘leading Junior,’ Beecher arose and said he wished to say a word on the other side, whereupon he ‘went for’ the Junior in a speech full of wit and point, which altogether ‘turned the tables’ to the 115great amusement of all present and the great annoyance of the ‘leading Junior.’ When the meeting broke up the Goliah of the Junior class found himself suffering from a wound which the little smooth stone from the sling of the hitherto unknown Freshman had made. This was a new experience for the proud Junior, and the wound rankled.

“It seems never to have been forgotten. Time passed on and the ‘leading Junior’ became a leading lawyer, jurist, judge, and Democratic politician, and when the great scandal arose volunteered a very strong argument against Mr. Beecher. It had great weight in some quarters, but was less convincing to those parties who remembered that this judge was eagerly embracing the first opportunity that had offered of paying off an old score of their college days.”

“He was whole-souled and hearty, humorous in the extreme but without a particle of viciousness, a reformer and an earnest man.” This is again the testimony of his classmate, Dr. Field.

“We would often gather on the steps of the chapel, a number of us incidentally, and if your father was in the gathering we always had much wit and sparkling repartee, and anecdote and description, all of which seemed to be infused by your father, and of which, indeed, he was the greater part. He always seemed full of health and hilarity, and yet, after all, there was a prevailing seriousness, an earnest purpose, a determination to be a good and true man. I never knew anything of him but what was good, and great, and orderly, and becoming a Christian. I have heard persons say he was wild in college. Nothing more untrue. I never heard him utter a word, and never heard of his doing a deed, that was contrary to the rules of morality and propriety. He would criticise some things in college studies, etc. I remember his maintaining very decidedly that the study of mathematics was not a good discipline for the mind, but he never set himself against college rules of order. He was a strong temperance man, and was very bold to rebuke his fellow-students in anything he thought to be wrong.”

Of his social and humorous qualities Mrs. Stowe says:

“In fact, Mr. Beecher was generally the centre of a circle of tempestuous merriment, ever eddying round him in one droll form or another.

“He was quick in repartee, an excellent mimic, and his stories 116would set the gravest in a roar. He had the art, when admonished by graver people, of somehow entrapping them into more uproarious laughing than he himself practised, and then looking innocently surprised.

“Mr. Beecher on one occasion was informed that the head tutor of the class was about to make him a grave exhortatory visit. The tutor was almost seven feet high, and as solemn as an Alpine forest. But Mr. Beecher knew that, like most solemn Yankees, he was at heart a deplorable wag, a mere whited sepulchre of conscientious gravity, with measureless depths of unrenewed chuckle hid away in the depths of his heart. When apprised of his approach he suddenly whisked away into his closet the chairs of his room, leaving only a low one which had been sawed off at the second joint, so that it stood about a foot from the floor. Then he crawled through the hole in that study-table which he had made after a peculiar plan of his own, and, seated meekly among his books, awaited the visit.

“A grave rap is heard. ‘Come in.’ Far up in the air the solemn dark face appears. Mr. Beecher rose ingenuously and offered to come out. ‘No, never mind,’ says the visitor; ‘I just came to have a little conversation with you. Don’t move.’

“‘Oh!’ says Beecher innocently, ‘pray sit down, sir,’ indicating the only chair.

“The tutor looked apprehensively, but began the process of sitting down. He went down, down, down, but still no solid ground being gained, straightened himself up and looked uneasy.

“‘I don’t know but that chair is too low for you; do let me get you another,’ said Beecher meekly.

“‘Oh! no, my young friend, don’t rise, don’t trouble yourself; it is perfectly agreeable to me; in fact, I like a low seat.’ And with these words the tall man doubled up like a jack-knife, and was seen sitting with his grave face between his knees, like a grasshopper drawn up for a spring. He heaved a deep sigh and his eyes met the eyes of Mr. Beecher; the hidden spark of native depravity within him was exploded by one glance at those merry eyes, and he burst into a loud roar of merriment, which the two continued for some time, greatly to the amusement of the boys who were watching to hear how Beecher would come out with his lecture. The chair was known thereafter as the ‘Tutor’s Delight.’”

117He carried his usual sports with him into college life. “On Saturday afternoons,” says Lewis Tappan, “we often revisited the woods in the rear of our former home, on which occasion your father would climb the tallest trees and place a pillow-case over the holes where the flying squirrels were. I on the ground rapped the trees, startling the inmates, who were caught in their efforts to escape.

“Botanical and geological specimens were collected on the way, and in his room your father had a good collection of the latter.”

He joined a club of eight who boarded a mile from college, that the going and returning for their meals might give them six miles of exercise a day. This was done in part to save expense, the board being cheaper at that distance from the village. He also walked from college to Boston, more than a hundred miles, on his vacations, for the same reason. Yet, with all his care in economy, and although his board cost him but $1.50 a week, it was thought at one time impossible to keep him in college on account of the expense, as this letter, written by a friend of the family during his Freshman year, will explain:

“While Henry and Charles were in college your father and mother felt very much straitened for money. One evening particularly they were talking about it, and did not know what they should do to keep the boys along. At last your father said: ‘Well, the Lord always has taken care of me, and I am sure he always will.’ The mother lay awake, she told me afterwards, and cried. She cried because she did not see how they should get along; but what most troubled her was that her husband had so much faith and she had not any.

“The next morning was Sabbath morning. Some one rang at the door, and a letter was handed in containing a $100 bill and no name. They came up to tell me, as they always did, but they did not know, nor I then, who gave it. I found out afterwards it was Mr. Homes—a thank-offering at the conversion of one of his children.“

The following letter, written near the close of his Freshman year, shows the bent of his mind at this period:

Lest we get a stronger impression of his sanctity at this time than the facts would warrant, we add this incident, related by himself, of one of his vacation experiences in Boston that has in it a very decided flavor of humorous and unsanctified humanity: “Looking for a friend, I rapped at the door where I thought he lived. The door stuck, but at last flew open after a good deal of tugging from the other side, and a very red-faced woman appeared and asked in a very cross tone what I wanted. ‘Does Mr. ——— live here?’ I asked very meekly. ‘No, he don’t!’ snapped the woman, and slammed the door in my face. I thought I would teach her a lesson; so, after I had walked a little ways to give her time to get to work, I went back and rapped 119again as if I wanted to tear the knocker off. And when the same woman opened the door I shouted at the top of my voice, ‘Who said he did?’ and then turned and walked away. When I reached the corner the woman was still gazing after me in amazed silence.”

It was at Amherst that young Beecher began his anti-slavery career, as he tells us in his sermon upon the death of Wendell Phillips:

“Fifty years ago, during my college life, I was chosen by the Athenian Society to debate the question of African colonization, which then was new, fresh, and enthusiastic.... Fortunately I was assigned to the negative side of the question, and in preparing to speak I prepared my whole life. I contended against colonization as a condition of emancipation—enforced colonization was but little better than enforced slavery—and advocated immediate emancipation on the broad ground of human rights. I knew but very little then, but I knew this, that all men are designed of God to be free, a fact which ought to be the text of every man’s life—this sacredness of humanity as given of God, redeemed from animalism by Jesus Christ, crowned and clothed with rights that no law nor oppression should dare touch.”

Of his religious life at this period we give the story in his own words:

“When I went to college there was a revival there, in which I was prodigiously waked up. I was then about seventeen years old, and I had begun to pass from boyhood to manhood, but I was yet in an unsettled state of mind. I had no firm religious ground to stand upon. I was beginning to slough hereditary influences without being able to take on more salutary influences, and I went through another phase of suffering which was far worse than any that I had previously experienced. It seemed as though all the darknesses of my childhood were mere puffs to the blackness which I was now passing through. My feeling was such that if dragging myself on my belly through the street had promised any chance of resulting in good I would have done it. No man was so mean that I was not willing to ask him to pray for me. There was no humiliation that I would not have submitted to ten thousand times over if thereby I could have found relief from the doubt, perplexity, and fear which tormented me.

“I went to Dr. Humphrey in my darkness of soul and said: 120‘I am without hope and am utterly wretched, and I want to be a Christian.’ He sat and looked with great compassion upon me (for he was one of the best men on earth; if there is a saint in heaven Dr. Humphrey is one), and said: ‘Ah! it is the Spirit of God, my young man; and when the Spirit of God is at work with a soul I dare not interfere.’ And I went away in blacker darkness than I came, if possible.

“I went to an inquiry-meeting which Professor Hitchcock was conducting, and when he saw me there he said: ‘My friends, I am so overwhelmed with the consciousness of God’s presence in this room that I cannot speak a word.’ And he stopped talking, and I got up and went out without obtaining rescue or help.

“Then I resorted to prayer, and frequently prayed all night—or should have done so if I had not gone to sleep; I tried a great many devices; I strove with terrific earnestness and tremendous strength; and I remember that one night, when I knelt before the fire where I had been studying and praying, there came the thought to my mind: ‘Will God permit the devil to have charge of one of his children that does not want to be deceived?’ and in an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God’s taking care of those who put their trust in him that for an hour all the world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my feet and began to cry and laugh; and, feeling that I must tell somebody what the Lord had done for me, I went and told Dr. Humphrey and others.

“I endeavored, from that time out, to help those who were in trouble of mind like that in which I had been whelmed; and yet I was in a sort of half-despair.”

It was in one of these half-despairing moods, doubtless, that he sought counsel from Moody Harrington, of whose piety and wisdom in directing inquirers he has often spoken. Harrington’s room-mate writes:

“It was in the midst of this great religious movement that one day Henry Ward Beecher came to our room—how distinctly I remember it!—and, with a countenance betokening a mighty pressure upon his spirit, said substantially: ‘Harrington, I am in great distress, in spiritual darkness; I don’t think I have any religion. I’ve come to talk with you.’ My room-mate took him into his bedroom and talked and prayed with him a long time, and when the young man came out from that interview his face 121seemed radiant with hope and peace. Years after Beecher had become famous he would repeatedly speak of Harrington as having been to him a spiritual helper beyond that of any other man he had known.”

His first talk in a religious meeting outside the school or college is thus described:

“I think it must have been late in my Freshman career at Amherst College or in my Sophomore. My mind was much stirred and distressed at that time on the subject of religion. In the class above, one Moody Harrington took much interest in me. He was in some respects a remarkable man for profound religious feeling, for fervid imagination, and for remarkable eloquence in exhortation. He lifted me by his personal sympathy and his encouragement out of great despondency and set me on my feet with some tremblings of heart. On one occasion he asked me to walk with him one evening to Logtown to a little prayer and conference meeting. After Harrington had spoken for a while he turned to me all unexpectedly and asked me to make some remarks. I was confounded. I rose and said something—I do not know what, nor did I quite know then, for everything was whirling darkness while I was speaking, but it was the letting out of waters. I never ride past the Dwight house without going out of the cars to look over the place and to bring back to memory that dismal night, and that dismal speech, and the dismal walk back to college, ashamed and silent.”

Another important event took place in his Sophomore year, January 2, 1832. He became engaged to Eunice White Bullard, daughter of Dr. Artemas Bullard, of West Sutton, Mass. Of this event, the preceding and succeeding acquaintance, our dear mother has written in a paper entitled “Looking Back,” of which she says: “Of course all this is no help to you in preparing your father’s life, but I sit and dream of the past and write just as it rises before me, as fresh as if but yesterday, hoping by doing so something may come to me that will be of service to you.”

We shall give her notes just as she has written them, leaving it for our readers to judge whether or not they are of any service:

Somewhere Father Beecher has described a “Saxon courtship” as “a grave and serious thing. It is a matter of consideration. I have known a proposal of love to be stated like a proposition, and calmly argued for and against with far less warmth than Luther would have felt in debating a thesis. Indeed, many courtships are like attempts at kindling fires with green wood—a few starveling coals are heaped together, a mere spark dances in and out upon the inhospitable charcoal, and disappears on one side as fast as it appears on the other. But by all manner of shavings and bits of paper—mere trinkets, as it were, and billet-doux—a slight flame is got up, which strives, with doubtful prospect, to convert the smoke into blaze. The bellows are called in, the fire is fairly driven up to its work, the green sticks begin to sizzle at either end; and though at last, when the heat triumphs, 128the fire is large and lasting, the poor fellow that kindled it had to work for it.”

Now, we never could bring ourselves to asking direct questions, and we do not suppose that we should ever have been any wiser if we had; but, from the references sometimes made to riding through covered bridges, from the comical look that would come to his face and the blushes that would be sure to come to her cheeks when the raillery around the table became hot and personal, we were led to believe that this was not their kind.

On two leaves of his diary, written probably while at his home in Boston in the vacation that followed his Freshman year, and during the summer in which he had made the acquaintance of Miss Bullard, we find the following:

“Sept. 3, 1831, Sab. morn.—I found the correspondence of my father and own mother this morning, and eagerly sought out her letters and read them. O my mother! I could not help kissing the letters. I looked at the paper and thought that her hand had rested upon it while writing it. The hand of my mother! She had formed every letter which I saw. She had looked upon that paper which I now looked upon. She had folded it. She had sent it. But I found out more of her mind than I ever knew before; more of her feelings, her piety. I should think from her writings that she was very amiable, lovely, and confiding in her disposition, yet had much dignity. She appeared to have a mind very clear, strong, yet not perceptible till brought out by her feelings. Her letter to father in which she treats of ‘love to God, whether we should love him because he has done us good or not,’ etc., I was much pleased with. And I could not help observing that her letters were superior, more refined and conclusive, than the corresponding ones of father’s. They corresponded upon subjects, it seems, as pride, dress, slander, etc., etc. Her piety was doubted by herself, although no one who reads her description of her feelings can doubt for a moment that Christ was found within her heart.

“The letter to father in reply, apparently, to one in which he had expressed his feelings toward her and urged for her permission to hope for a future union, pleased me much. There was much playfulness about it. I thought that I could see that she loved him while she was writing it, yet she tried not exactly to show it. I should think that at the conclusion she told her feelings 129frankly, from one line which I saw, but the rest was torn off. I suspect that father did it that no one might ever see it.”

In common with many other students of limited means, he taught a term of eight weeks during three of the four years of his college course, using the winter vacation, which was at first six weeks long, and borrowing two weeks from the winter term in college.

Of his experience in Hopkinton and some other matters, especially the fear of his friends concerning his engagement, the following letter to his brother William gives some interesting details:

Of his preaching at this time he says:

“My earliest remembered sermons were delivered at Northbridge, Mass., where I taught school for three months in 1831. I conducted conference meetings almost every night, and a temperance address at Upton, Mass., where old Father Wood was pastor, and in his church. In the winter of 1832 I taught school in Hopkinton, Mass., and carried on revival meetings every night and preached on Sundays. The people were plain and simple and liked the effusions. During the winter of 1833 I again taught school at Northbridge, and made a formal sermon in a chapel over the new store built by Messrs. Whitings.”

It was in his Sophomore year that a number of students, Henry Ward among them, invited a college mate who had been reading up on phrenology to deliver a lecture upon that subject. They did it for a joke, but it ended in Henry Ward’s accepting this philosophy as the foundation of the mental science which he used through life.

It was during his college course that he began lecturing—that mode of communication with the people that afterwards became so popular, and in which for so many years he was the acknowledged leader. His first formal lecture for which he received pay was delivered in Brattleboro’, Vt. He was paid ten 131dollars, and walked the whole distance, nearly fifty miles each way, that he might have the whole sum to expend as he pleased.

Speaking of this period, he says:

“There stands before me a line of battered and worn books—English classics. Their history is little to them, but much to me. In part it is my own history. I wish I could lay my hand on the first book that I ever bought after the dim idea of a library began to hover in my mind! But that book is gone. Here, however, are others whose biography I can give. As early as 1832 I began to buy books—a few volumes, but each one a monument of engineering. My first books, if I remember correctly, were bought of J. S. & C. Adams, in Amherst, Mass. I used to go in there and look wistfully at their shelves. My allowance of money was very small—scarcely more than enough to pay my postage, when a letter cost twelve and a half or twenty-five cents. To take a two or three-dollar book from my five dollars of spending-money would have left me in a state of sad impecuniosity. Therefore, for many, many months I took it out in looking.

“As early as at sixteen years of age I had begun to speak a little in public—faint peepings, just such as I hear in young birds before they are fully fledged. For such service the only payment was a kind patience till I relieved them by finishing my crude efforts. But at that time—say 1832—I was sent by the college society as delegate to a temperance convention in Pelham, or Enfield, or somewhere else. I conceived a desire thereafter to give a temperance lecture. I have forgotten how I ever got a chance to do it. But I remember that there came an invitation from Brattleboro’, Vt., to lecture on the 4th of July. My expenses were to be paid! A modest pride warmed my heart at the thought of making a real speech in public. I smothered all the fears and diffidences with the resolute purpose that I would succeed! I remember the days of writing and anxious preparation, and the grand sense of being a man when I had finished my manuscript! But the most generous purposes are apt to be ruined with selfishness; and my public spirit, alas! had a financial streak of joy in it—my expenses were to be paid!

“Well, suppose I chose to walk and save all the expenses? I should have at least eight dollars of my own, of which I need give no account! That would be an era indeed. But grave 132scruples arose. Was it honest to take money for expenses which I had not really incurred? If I went by stage I might lawfully charge my fare and food; but if neither of them cost me anything, how could I honestly make a bill of expenses? I did not get any relief in reflecting upon it. I started off on foot, went up the Connecticut River valley, and reached Brattleboro’ by way of Greenfield.

“Every hour this question of honesty returned. My feet blistered with walking, but I stamped on them hard in the morning, and the momentary exquisite pain seemed to paralyze the sensibility afterwards. Whether it was the counter irritation that relieved my brain, or whether—as I fear that I did—I smothered conscience by saying to myself that I would settle the matter when the time came, I do not know. But I was relieved from even that struggle, inasmuch as not a word was said to me about expenses, or money in any form. Yet I had a charming visit. The rising of the moon from behind the mountain that hedges in the town on the east powerfully excited my imagination, and led to the writing of the first piece, I believe, that I ever printed. It was published in the Guest, a college paper, issued chiefly as a rival to another college paper whose name (alas!) has escaped me. And if anybody could send me a volume of that Guest I should be exceedingly beholden to him!

“But after reaching college again—no longer a mere student, but a public man, one who had made speeches, one who determined to be modest and not to allow success to puff him up—a very great and wonderful thing happened: the post brought me a letter from Brattleboro’ containing ten dollars. I could not believe my eyes. I forgot my scruples. Providence had put it to me in such a way that I got my conscience over on the other side, and felt that it would be a sin and shame for me to be raising questions and scruples on such a matter! But O that bill! How it warmed me and invigorated me! I looked at it before going to sleep; I examined my pocket the next morning early, to be sure that I had not dreamed it. How I pitied the poor students, who had not, I well knew, ten dollars in their pockets. Still, I tried to keep down pride in its offensive forms. I would not be lifted up. I would strive to be even more familiar than before with the plainest of my acquaintances. ‘What is money?’ said I to myself. ‘It is not property that 133makes the man; it is—’ Well, perhaps I thought it was the ability to deliver eloquent temperance addresses. But great is the deceitfulness of money. I felt the pride of riches. I knew every waking moment that I had money. I was getting purse-proud.

“I resolved to invest. There was but one thing to invest in—books. I went to Adams’s store; I saw an edition of Burke’s works. With the ease and air of a rich man I bought and paid for them. Adams looked at me, and then at the bill, and then at me. I never could make up my mind whether it was admiration or suspicion that his face expressed. But I wanted him, and panted to have him ask me, ‘Where did you get all of this ten-dollar bill?’

“However, I concluded that the expression was one of genuine admiration. With my books under my arm (I never to this day could get over the disposition to carry home my own packages) I returned to college, and placed on my table my volumes of Burke! I tried to hide from myself that I had a vain purpose in it, that I was waiting to see Bannister’s surprises and to hear Howard’s exclamation, and to have it whispered in the class-room: ‘I say! have you heard that Beecher has got a splendid copy of Burke?’

“After this I was a man that owned a library! I became conservative and frugal. Before, I had spent at least a dollar and a half a year for knickknacks; but after I had founded a library I reformed all such wastes, and every penny I could raise or save I compelled to transform itself into books!

“As I look back on the influence of this struggle for books I cannot deny that it has been salutary. I do not believe that I spent ten dollars in all my college course for horses or amusements of any kind. But at my graduation I owned about fifty volumes. The getting of these volumes was not the least important element of my college education. There are two kinds of property which tend to moralize life. What they are I will tell you some other time, if you will coax me.”

His reading, as we have said, was very largely of the old English writers, whom he studied until the flavor of their language had been so thoroughly appropriated that it is very plainly discernible in all his early public writings. An old poet, Daniel, who belonged to the times of Spenser and Shakspere, 134was a great favorite of his. In a sermon preached in 1862 he quotes the poem that especially pleased him. We quote it entire with his introduction, and venture to say that the mind that makes choice of such a poem is sound and healthy at the core:

“I remembered a poem that I had read in my youth, and that I used to hang over with great interest. It had a strange fascination for me then. The writer was born in 1562, and he wrote it somewhere between that time and 1600. It has had a good long swing, and it will go rolling down a great many years yet:

Such is the record of Henry Ward Beecher in college. It is one of which none need be ashamed. It may be pondered with advantage and followed with profit by every one standing himself upon the threshold of that eventful period in his own life. It is the record of a man who was loyal to duty, to truth and purity. Independent in his line of thought and study, yet obedient to the government of the college, industrious and aspiring, his course was essentially a period of education, a drawing out of his powers, a training-school of his whole nature, a fitting preparation for that high place which he came ultimately to fill in the confidence and affection of the nation and the world.

Lane Seminary—Dr. Beecher Called—Home at Walnut Hills—Amusing Incidents—Family Meeting—Death of Mrs. Beecher—Extracts from Journal—First Mention of Preaching in the West—Experience in Ecclesiastical Matters—Despondency—Meeting of Synod—Influences of the Times—Revulsion—A Rift along the Horizon—“Full iolly Knight.”

At the close of his college course, after a two-days’ visit to Sutton with Miss Bullard, he started for Cincinnati to begin his theological studies at Lane Seminary, of which institution his father had been elected president and professor of theology, and whither he had moved with his family two years before. The Seminary, located at Walnut Hills, two miles out of the city, had been established for the sake of supplying preachers and pastors for the great and growing West. It was thought that the territory traversed by the Ohio and the Mississippi was “the valley of decision” for the great interests of our country and of the world. To meet the emergency and take possession of this broad domain for Christ, its rightful Lord, was felt to be the most important work that could occupy the attention of the Christian public. It had been decided that a theological seminary established at Cincinnati, in the very centre of this district, afforded the most effective means for attaining the great object in view; that the best man in the whole country should be secured to stand at its head; and that that man, all things considered, was Dr. Beecher. He would bring energy, enthusiasm, and practical wisdom; would secure confidence in the work among Eastern capitalists, and conduct the enterprise to assured success.

Out of this conviction sprang the Seminary and the call to Dr. Beecher to be its head. He was in perfect and enthusiastic sympathy with the object in view. He says of the project: “There was not on earth a place but that I would have opened my ears to for a moment.... But I had felt and thought and labored a great deal about raising up ministers, and the idea that I might be called to teach the best mode of preaching to the young ministry of the broad West flashed through my mind 137like lightning. It was the greatest thought that ever entered my soul; it filled it, and displaced everything else.”

Coming to this definite work under the inspiration of this great thought, from a church which had been for years in the midst of a continuous revival, he had naturally given the Seminary a markedly practical tone of spiritual earnestness. A strong man himself, he attracted men of like stamp; and there had come, soon after he took charge of the institution, “a noble class of young men, uncommonly strong, a little uncivilized, entirely radical, and terribly in earnest.”

Dr. Beecher’s method of instruction was peculiar and in harmony with his spirit and purpose. It was not so much of the formal lecture order as of the free conversational kind, in which questions were invited, objections were answered, thought was quickened, and feeling was awakened, with the result that the great truth which was the subject of the lecture was likely to be not only in a large measure comprehended but felt and appropriated by the students.

One of the professors, Calvin E. Stowe, for whom Henry Ward conceived one of those ardent friendships which distinguished him through life, helped him in the same direction. “He led him to an examination of the Bible and to an analysis of its several portions, not as the parts of a machine, formal and dead, but as of a body of truth instinct with God, warm with all divine and human sympathies, clothed with language adapted to their fit expression and to be understood as similar language used for similar ends in every-day life.” And we have now in our hands a roll of manuscript in which, in line with this idea, the young student wrote out during his theological course a careful analysis of the miracles and parables of the New Testament.

Without doubt this tone of the institution and method of instruction had an important and very beneficial influence upon him at this formative period of his professional life, giving him a genuine enthusiasm for his work, and training him to investigate carefully and analyze clearly the truths brought under examination.

And, that there might be lacking no element for his fittest training for the great work that was before him, the question of slavery had arisen among the students, creating such a disturbance 138that forty, under the leadership of Theodore Weld, had withdrawn just before he appeared on the ground.

Of the place, his coming, and some of the incidents in his life his brother, Rev. T. K. Beecher, says:

“By and by they two, Henry and Charles, came to study theology in Lane Seminary, a brick building in the woods of Ohio. The whistle of the quail, the scolding squirrels, once the heavy, busky flight of wild turkeys—my hero killed one and claimed a second—the soft thump and pat of a rabbit, the breezy rush of wild pigeons, were here heard.

“A foot-path led through the woods, over which came three times a day the heroes, shouting, exploding the vowel sounds, and imitating cows, frogs, and crows—a laughing menagerie.

“The Academy of Music, two miles off down-town—Henry primo-basso, Charles violin and tenor; and the little boy, at last an alto, permitted to run between the heroes and sing, while eyes feasted on Charles’s violin bow-hand, and ears were filled with Henry’s basso, are well remembered.

“The ‘Creation’ and ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ were our winter’s work, and Henry was off sometimes lecturing on temperance and phrenology. Sometimes on a Saturday morning, at family prayer, there were Catharine, George, Henry, Harriet, Isabella, Tom and Jim, Aunt Esther, and father still praying ‘Overturn and overturn,’ and singing by all hands:

Long, long discussions, lasting till past midnight and resumed at every meal, of ‘free agency,’ ‘sovereignty,’ ‘natural and moral ability,’ interpretations, and such.

“Charles could whittle graceful boats with sharp knife out of thick sticks.

“Henry had the full set of Walter Scott’s works.

“Charles took lessons on the violin of Tosso, in the city. Henry wrote something that Editor Charles Hammond printed 139in the Cincinnati Gazette. O wonderful Henry! They both wrote long, long letters to two far-away beings, and the little boy sometimes took them to the post-office and paid twenty-five cents, wondering what they could find to write such long, long letters about.”

His brother Charles says:

“The glorious old forest lay between the Seminary and father’s house, and we made it ring with vocal practice and musical scales and imitations of band-music. The house father occupied was of brick, and Henry whitewashed it with a kind of whitewash that was equal to paint, of a sort of cream color. I can see him now, on his tall ladder, with his spattered overalls, working away.

“One of our professors was B———, a nice, dapper, rosy little man, in the chair of history. We naughty boys made fun of him. Henry took notes. I would give something handsome for that note-book. B——— was fond of quoting authors with sounding names, Bochart among others, and Henry would have it ‘Go-cart,’ and made a hieroglyphic to that effect.

“We walked to and from the city, up and down the long hill, and attended father’s church, Second Presbyterian, on Fourth Street. Henry had a Bible-class of young ladies, for which he made preparation by writing.”

For three years young Beecher was again a member of the home-circle, from which he had been so long separated. This home had apparently lost none of that broad, open-doored hospitality and cheerful spirit that so markedly characterized it in Litchfield. “The house was full. There was a constant high tide of life and animation. The old carry-all was perpetually vibrating between home and the city, and the excitement of coming and going rendered anything like stagnation an impossibility.” “It was an exuberant and glorious life while it lasted. The atmosphere of the household was replete with mental oxygen, full charged with intellectual electricity. Nowhere else have we felt anything resembling or equalling it. It was a kind of moral heaven, the purity, vivacity, inspiration, and enthusiasm of which only those can appreciate who have lost it and feel that in this world there is, there can be, no place like home.”

Of two of its members and some of their make-shifts we have this account, copied from his journal:

“The Economical Family.—My father was an excellent man 140(for no one provided better dinners—soups, codfish, mutton-chops; even, upon great days, he has been known to have a turkey). He was a man of enlarged mind and great sagacity. He was before his age in his views, and always before his salary in his expenses. This was from no want of calculation: nobody ever was longer and shrewder in that. But he was aspiring, and by nature seemed to go beyond things seen, far into the region of things hoped for.

“His sister, an antique maiden lady, differed vastly from him and could in no sense be called enlightened. It was astonishing to see how his example and his reasoning were thrown away upon her. To the last she clung to those earthly, low notions which seem so peculiar to this world. She would persist in saying that no one should buy what he could not pay for, nor pay for any new thing until old debts were settled. Nor could she be brought to adopt an enlarged policy in respect to the family. We were obliged to wear clothes until they were worn out—at least out at the knees and elbows—altho’ the fashion should change a dozen times during that period. So that it was not uncommon to find one’s self two or three times the pink of fashion before a suit was fairly condemned as unseaworthy. In fact, we may be said always to have set the fashion at such times, since we were seen wearing the proper cut before even the leading beau. But if this was comfortable it was but little amends for the days of darkness which ensued. One day we revelled (?) in our glory; the next every one gaped at our uncouth fashion. We might properly be likened to a ship riding gracefully upon the water, but suddenly left by the tide sticking in the mud, stiff and immovable. I used to comfort myself, when laughed at, by saying, ‘Never mind; you laugh now, before six months you’ll be imitating me.’ And so it often proved, till I began to think I was a prophet.

“But it is of the family I write and not of myself, for be it known that I am not under vassalage. I am free from both authority and—money; the latter condition as no reproach. I have often noticed that these two kinds of independence are closely allied. True independence seems always in the lurch.”

One amusing incident that grew out of the half country-farm life which they then lived he used often to refer to.

Living in the outskirts of the city, where the fences were 141poor and straying cattle often gave them great annoyance, Henry one day, to his immense disgust, found a cow quietly resting in the middle of the barn floor. With the accumulated indignation aroused, by numerous chases, which these poachers of the highway had led him, by many tramplings across flower-beds and destruction of the garden vegetables, he drove her out and chased her down the street. Coming in hot and tired from his run, he threw himself upon the sofa, saying: “There, I guess I have taught one old cow to know where she belongs!” “What do you mean?” said the doctor, looking up apprehensively from his paper. “Why, I found another cow in the barn, and I have turned her out and chased her clear down the street, and I think she will stay away now.” “Well,” said Dr. Beecher, “you have done it. I have just bought that cow, and had to wade the Ohio River twice to get her home, and after I have got her safely into the barn you have turned her out. You have done it, and no mistake.” And the chasing of that cow was renewed.

His humor bubbled out at all times and in all places, finding its occasion even in so staid a matter as chapel prayers. He roomed with Prof. Stowe, who was the soul of punctuality, and was continually pained at the failure of his young room-mate to be on time at morning prayers in the Seminary chapel.

Having done his best to wake him up one morning, apparently without success, he had gone down-stairs with many expressions of disgust. No sooner was he out of the room than Henry sprang up, dressed himself as only college students can, ran to the Seminary by a back way, and when the professor entered was sitting demurely in front of the desk. The amazement of the teacher at this unexpected appearance, rubbing his glasses and peering at him again and again to determine whether it was real or he only saw a vision, was always remembered by Mr. Beecher with a chuckle of merriment.

For a short time near the close of his theological course he edited a paper, and appears to have done his work with marked success; but circumstances brought it to a speedy close. “The Cincinnati Journal needed an editor. There was at that time in the middle class of Lane Seminary a green young man of some facility of pen. He had written a series of anonymous articles on the Catholic question in the evening paper edited by Mr. Thomas. He was considered rather tonguey, and not 142likely to back down from anything from want of hopefulness and self-confidence. Him Dr. Brainerd called to the chair, and, on relinquishing the editorship, recommended this beardless youth to the proprietors of the journal as his successor. One fine morning this young man found himself an editor upon a salary! An editor must have a coat; and Platt Evans made a lion-skin overcoat that has never had a successor or an equal. He must have a watch! A plain, white-faced watch soon ticked in his pocket. Alas! evil days befell the publishers. The paper had a new owner. He did not want the young editor; the young editor did want the watch, but could not pay for it; the seller took it back, to the great grief of the young theologian, who went back disconsolate to his classes at Lane Seminary, and was broken-hearted for a whole day. The young man recovered, and has been in mischief ever since, some folks think.”

When the pro-slavery riots broke out in Cincinnati in 1836, and James G. Birney’s printing-office and press were destroyed by a mob headed by Kentucky slaveholders, young Beecher volunteered and was sworn in as special constable, and for several nights patrolled the streets thoroughly armed to protect the negroes and their friends. He was earnest in this matter, as in everything else that he undertook. His sister Harriet, finding him busy running bullets, and asking him what he was doing it for, was a good deal startled to hear him answer in a hard, determined voice: “To kill men.”

Besides the influence of this common, every-day life, which was afterwards reflected in his own hospitable spirit and home, two domestic events took place during these three years that deserve more especial notice. The first was “the Family Meeting.”

“Long before Edward came out here the doctor had tried to have a family meeting, but did not succeed. The children were too scattered. Two were in Connecticut, some in Massachusetts, and one in Rhode Island. But now—just think of it!—there has been a family meeting in Ohio! When Edward returned he brought on Mary from Hartford. William came down from Putnam, George from Batavia, Ohio; Catharine and Harriet were here already; Henry and Charles at home, too, besides Isabella, Thomas, and James. These eleven! The first time they all ever met together! Mary had never seen James, and she had 143seen Thomas but once. Such a time as they had! The old doctor was almost transported with joy. The affair had been under negotiation for some time. He returned home from Dayton late one Saturday evening. The next morning they for the first time assembled in the parlor. There were more tears than words. The doctor attempted to pray, but could scarcely speak. His full heart poured itself out in a flood of weeping. He could not go on. Edward continued, and each one in his turn uttered some sentence of thanksgiving. They then began at the head and related their fortunes. After special prayer all joined hands and sang ‘Old Hundred’ in these words:

“When left alone in the evening they had a general examination of all their characters. The shafts of wit flew amain, the doctor being struck in several places. He was, however, expert enough to hit most of them in return. From the uproar of the general battle all must have been wounded....

“Tuesday morning saw them together again, drawn up in a straight line for the inspection of the king of happy men. After receiving particular instructions they formed into a circle. The doctor made a long and affecting speech. He felt that he stood for the last time in the midst of all his children, and each word fell with the weight of a patriarch’s. He embraced them once more in all the tenderness of his big heart. Each took of all a farewell kiss. With joined hands they united in a hymn. A prayer was offered, and finally the parting blessing was spoken.”

The other event referred to was the death of Mrs. Beecher, which occurred at the close of Henry’s first Seminary year. She was his step-mother, but “she did all that she could for my good.”

“In the holy yearnings of this truly devoted mother the whole family was included; nor could the older children perceive any less fervency in her desires for their true welfare than for that of her own flesh and blood.” And it was with deep and true feeling that he writes “that God was with her in her closing days, and that the light of his countenance cheered her passage to the tomb.”

144These varied experiences of joy and sorrow in the home-life of this period; this variety of occupation—now studying and attending lectures in the Seminary, lecturing on temperance and phrenology, drilling in the “Hallelujah Chorus,” painting the old family mansion, accompanying his father in his attendance upon presbytery and synod, now a constable and anon an editor—all contributed to give him a broad culture, had much to do with the variety of labor which he undertook in after-life, and fitted him for that easy, natural, and familiar mingling with all kinds and conditions of men which was in him so marked a characteristic.

Of what he did, read, and thought at this time we are fortunate in having another source of authentic information from his own pen. Upon the unruled blank leaf of a letter-book, as large as a commercial ledger and heavily bound in leather, is written in a large hand, large enough to cover the whole page:

On the first page, “Begun three days after birthday,” June 27. “I have tried times without number to keep a diary or a journal of my religious feelings. I have never succeeded.” 1. “I am not enough contemplative to make a record of reflections and feelings very definite.” 2. “I never could be sincere. The only use which I distinctly know that I have derived from it is a knowledge of my being very averse to saying just what my feelings were. I could not help feeling: ‘This will, perhaps, be seen.’ And why should I not so feel? One object in keeping a journal is to look back upon your mind as it reflected itself at different periods past, and if you keep one no one can pretend to have enough of prospective wisdom to save it from the hands of others.”

145After half a page of reasons why this possibility—which has indeed been realized—may take place, he says: “Can I conceal it all from myself, and feign to myself that that which I am disclosing and giving form and permanence to, my most secret feelings, none will see? And when I feel secretly that they will be seen, is it possible to go through honestly a narration of those emotions from the disclosure of which I shrink in my inmost soul?”

In view of this possibility, he decides upon a modification of his ideal:

“In this journal I do not set before me as an object to tell all my feelings, but only such as for any reason I may choose to tell. I intend to record, too, my opinions and reflections on occurrences, on persons, on books, and to find a resting-place, if possible, for many of those daily thoughts which are too short and unconnected to be noted down separately, and yet of some small value, perhaps—at least to give variety to a journal. Then, too, being little tenacious of dates, I here mean to record and date all changes in my life, that afterwards, when business and multiplicity of other facts have crowded from my mind such facts, I may here recur as to a faithful chronicle and refresh my memory.

“Here, then, I mean to be at ease, and not molest myself with any obligations to write so much, or so often, or so anything, but in mental dishabille I will stroll through my mind and do as I choose.”

It can well be supposed that with such an introduction facing us we feel some delicacy, even with the quasi permission which his departure from the true ideal of a journal gives, in handling, and especially in giving to the public, the matters which are here written. While we find no word that a perfectly upright and honorable man need be ashamed of, we do find private matters which we have no right to make public. Out of the great amount of material which the journal affords we have selected such portions as illustrate the salient features of his life, character, work, and methods at this time.

First of all, we find him still keeping up the old habit of reading, and after a very critical method.

“July 1, 1835.—I finished Scott’s ‘Antiquary’ this morning, and I propose giving some little account of my impressions. To do it I shall be obliged to collect my general scattered feelings 146into a definite, tangible form; and if I always did it after reading I should have more numerous ideas of things and of their forms, and more correct ones.

“I think it one of Scott’s best, although my personal taste gives his novels founded on warlike customs, as ‘Ivanhoe,’ more relish. But that does not alter the abstract merits of this, for there are grounds of judging a work altogether aside from our taste as to the subject judged. There are but two general considerations in estimating a novel. First, has the author been a faithful copyist of nature, even when his effort is of the imagination? And, second, has he made a judicious selection and skilful combination of his material.”

After several pages of the large ledger have been devoted to this subject, there follows this entry:

“July 4.—The difference between Scott and Shakspere is of two kinds: (1) the difference of dramatic and prosaic description, and (2) the native difference of the two men. The first involves a discussion and comparison of the two kinds of writing. The dramatic is narrower, more formal and measured, and consequently more stiff. No one ever heard one speak as Macbeth, as Hamlet, or as Iago, for no one ever spoke so. Passion, or indeed nature, never marches in heroic measure. In another respect it differs. There is a general sameness of language. The imitation of nature respects feelings and character, and not expression, if we except some comic characters. But prose imitates with perfect freedom, unshackled by verse, not only the passion, character, etc., but the expression and language.

“In this respect Scott differs from himself as a poet and novelist as much as when a novelist he differs from Shakspere, etc....”

Similar and lengthy criticisms of Crabbe, Coleridge, Byron, Burns, and others follow, many of them crude, but all aiming to grasp and express the original thought of the poet, as he says after naming some rules by which to judge a book:

“But such things are the externals of criticism. I admire the German way of going into the motive and spirit of a poem, and discussing the principles and source of feeling.”

We find his habit of drawing from his own experiences some moral or spiritual lesson, and then teaching it to others, thus early formed:

147“June 27, 1835.— ... Being unwell is by no means useless. It crowds one on to thoughts of death, and sweeps away all the mist of forgetfulness which the frivolity of events has accumulated. One must either wrap himself in designed forgetfulness—which is a stupid resource—or come to some conclusion in respect to his religious prospects. For my part, in sickness (what little I have had) I am not agitated, but rendered serious and calmly apprehensive, and I begin to think what God is, and Christ, and heavenly joy, and compare them with my tastes and disposition, and see if they accord or are repulsive. I’ve written enough for the present, so I’ll return to Scott’s ‘Legend of Montrose.’”

We find very little, almost nothing, concerning the regulation work and studies of the theological course, possibly because some other book which has not come down to us contained these. He seems to have plenty to do, and carries into his work a very decided determination to succeed.

“Aug. 2, 1835, Sunday.—I have for this time work enough: two courses of lectures—one, for my Bible-class, to begin next Sunday; the other a course of temperance lectures for Reading and elsewhere. I don’t know how I shall succeed, but I am never self-distrustful and often feel sure I shall do VERY well, and as often see that I may fall through entirely. Either course failing would mortify me. But here, as elsewhere, let me start with feeling, ‘I will persevere, and with every endeavor which interest and ingenuity can furnish.’ Such being one’s constant feeling and action, hardly anything is invincible. Perseverance without corresponding exercise of ALL ONE’S MIND is but a dogged spinning out of tedious and useless effort. Remember when most discouraged to labor as though you were in the full blossom of Hope, and shortly you will be.”

At this time he was singing in, and sometimes leading, the choir in his father’s church, as he writes:

“Nov. 14.—The medical authorities of the family, having ordered me up for inspection, have decided that I was not sea-worthy, but have, in view of past services, ordered me into dock to be a receiving-ship, and there to undergo thorough repairs. I am quietly riding in the dock without mast or rigging. They have sent aboard two sets of workmen this morning, under the care of Messrs. Calomel and Aloes; and these are to remove 148all my cargo, ballast, etc., after which I am to be new-rigged and furnished and sent out on a new cruise. This is well. I have sailed very dully for some time and came near to foundering once or twice.

“Will you take my place to-day and sing bass? I know of no one possessing suitable gravity except yourself to confront the audience and do justice to music....    Yours truly,

A line of tender sentiment runs through the journal, appearing whenever any reference is made to the one to whom he was engaged. Concerning so delicate a matter we only give extracts sufficient to show the radiant atmosphere in which, at least at times, he walked, and the deep and sincere affection which he cherished. They are to be read as the opening stanzas of that beautiful idyl that closed only with his life.

“Aug. 4, 1835.—It is a little curious, perhaps not, however, that I very much dislike to say anything in my journal of my thoughts and feeling for E., who is so much of my existence. Well, I suppose the more and the more delicately we love the less we care and wish to say about it. It becomes a matter of heart, not of tongue; it becomes a feeling, and feeling has no language except action. I have sent her a large letter, largely laden with affection....”

“Aug. 5, 1835.—Woke up and thought of E———, M———, and G———; compared their characters. M——— is marked by INTELLECT, G——— by lady-like character, sweetness, and gayness. E——— has neither so prominent, but both well combined and softened by strongest and sweetest affectionateness. Her character is uniform, and projects, if anywhere, in line of affection.”

“Sept. 14, 1835.—I wonder what people think of my warmth? Some, I know, estimate it far too highly, because they have not seen much of such things. Others, and most, suppose it very low and suspect very little of it. It is in truth but medium naturally. Well, in a year or two, and then E——— will be disappointed the right way. What a noble creature E——— is! I could have looked through ten thousand and never have found one so every way suited to me. How dearly do I love her! I long for the portrait.”

“Oct. 1, 1835.—Found a packet of letters from my dearest 149E———. Oh, how dear! Her likeness too, which, though imperfect in some respects, has very much the looks of the original, and if only one feature were preserved I would feel grateful. But, excepting the mouth, each feature is faithfully like her own. I shall begin a letter to her to-night. God bless and keep her! I love her more and more and say less and less about it.

“Harriet has had E———’s portrait all day, and I have felt quite lonesome without it. Last evening I retired to bed and very philosophically decided to leave the portrait in my side-pocket. I lay for some half-hour and was quite convinced that it was in the wrong place, and removed it to my pillow. It soon underwent another migration—where, one may imagine if he will recall all such doings as depicted in novels.”

The following is his first mention of preaching in the West:

“Aug. 9, Sunday, 1835.—Preached twice in George’s church. In morning with great dryness and trouble, and felt much mortified—more, I think, than grieved.

“Afternoon smaller audience, but had great liberty and fluency, and produced effect; but whether superficial or permanent and saving, God only knows. Afternoon text: ‘My ways not as your ways’; Morning: ‘For we thus judge’ (2 Cor. v. 14, etc.)

“After preliminaries, subject, ‘The genius of Christianity is not to produce gloom or debar from pleasure; but, contrary, earthly pleasures can only be enjoyed by Christians, and much more heavenly.’”

He begins to be conscious of unused powers.

“Sept., 1835.—Since reading Crabbe and Scott I am possessed with the notion of writing characters. I have some models which I know would be originals.”

His love of fun evidently subjected him now and then to criticism. To one whose remarks had touched him to the quick he writes in self-defence:

“Oct. 29 [1835].—... You said last night that I was never made for a minister. If a minister were made to wear a lachrymose face and never to enjoy or make mirth, you said truly and I was not born to it. There are, in fact, three classes of divines—the ascetic, the neuter, and the sunshiny; the first conceive the chief end of man to consist in a long face, upturned eyes, a profound sanctimonious look.... I must plead guilty if you mean 150that I was not born to the rank of these worthy personages. Far be it from me to believe that religion makes ridiculous dunces. And though I think many such are truly pious men, yet such endowments are the deformity and misfortune, not the ornament, of their piety. The second class I call neuter because they (like the Chinese leaf by which character is told) quirl and roll just according to the party with which they are.... I must confess I have too many opinions of my own to be whirled about by every change of company. And though it is proper and decent that one should conform to the nature of different occasions, so as not to jest at a funeral, laugh at church, or dance in a hospital among the sick, the dead and dying; and though one should respect the conditions of his company, so as not to obtrude upon age the buoyancy of youth, ... yet I am sure neither old age nor old reflections ... shall make me disown mirth.... Now for the third class, the glorious, sunshiny ones. I envy them, I emulate them. These are they who think there is a time for relaxation and elegant enjoyment. Too much is to be done to allow them long seasons of gayety.... But while they labor hard, think and write, and preach and visit, weeping with those who weep, they conceive by the same authority that they may unbend and refresh the mind by laughing with those who laugh.... To be mirthful is part of our constitution, and I believe God never gave us that which it is a sin to exercise.... None but those who feel it can tell how hard it is to restrain a disposition which sees everything in the most ludicrous point of view. But God knows that if I have a good deal of mirth I compensate for it in secret; and although now I look for different times, yet till now I have had enough of anything but joy to make mirth acceptable to me. You said what you did in jest, but I lay awake all night thinking of it. God will bear me witness that I love the ministry, and if it be necessary for me to lay aside even my constitutional gayety that I may be more useful, I will cheerfully do it....”

From a “catalogue of books in my possession” we learn that on December 2, 1835, he had 42 volumes of theological works, 71 volumes of literary, 10 scientific, and 12 miscellaneous, making a grand total in all of 135 volumes—not a bad showing for one who had earned every book, either by labor or severe economy, and, what is more to the point, had read and studied them all.

We must now turn from the perusal of his journal to note 151other influences than those already referred to—those of the Seminary, of home and books—that were at work upon him at this time. There were some that had a very important influence in shaping his ecclesiastical bearing through life.

These were days of heresy-hunting; days when Albert Barnes was arraigned before presbytery for unsoundness because of some kind of heterodoxy (?) discovered in his notes upon Romans, and when the conflict between the two parties in the Presbyterian Church was rapidly advancing to a division of that great body into Old and New School. “Dr. Beecher,” so writes Mrs. Stowe, “was now the central point of a great theological battle. It was a sort of spiritual Armageddon, being the confluence of the forces of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Calvinistic fatalism, meeting in battle with the advancing rationalism of New England New School theology. On one side was hard, literal interpretation of Bible declarations and the Presbyterian standards asserting man’s utter and absolute natural and moral inability to obey God’s commands, and on the other side the doctrine of man’s free agency and the bringing to the rendering of the declarations of the Scriptures and of the standards the lights of modern modes of interpretation.” This battle soon assumed the character of an assault upon Dr. Lyman Beecher for the purpose of his destruction. His son knew it to be wholly without justification and as senseless as it was wicked. He knew his father’s earnestness, devotion, and unselfishness, the sacrifices he had made to take up this work, felt how greatly he deserved the gratitude of all Christian men; and when he saw that father attacked for heresy and brought before every tribunal of the Presbyterian Church, except the highest, for trial, and all because his construction of the Presbyterian Confession was not according to the views of one or two of the leaders of that Church in the West, he was not more indignant than disgusted.

He saw him triumphantly acquitted by one body after another, but still pursued by suspicion, and knew that a conspiracy had been formed in which some of his Eastern friends and one or more Eastern seminaries were enlisted, with the avowed intention of crushing him, and all this mostly by good men, under the strong bias of ecclesiastical prejudice and in a mistaken zeal for God’s service.

We must feel his disgust as he was compelled to go scurrying 152through the country, not to rescue souls from danger nor to forward any great moral end, but to anticipate the action of some presbytery or arrange for some meeting of synod; we must realize his indignation at seeing his father compelled to leave the death-bed of his mother to defend himself against these heresy-hunters, if we would understand the position which Mr. Beecher occupied towards ecclesiastical bodies in after-years.

In a letter dated “Canal Boat, Wednesday morning, Oct. 14, 1835,” Henry Ward gives an account of a meeting of Synod. After a humorous description of the eccentricities of Dr. Beecher, for which we have no space, he writes: “At length we are ready to start. A trunk tumbles out of one side as Thomas tumbles in the other. I reverse the order—tumble Tom out, the trunk in. At length all are aboard, and father drives out of the yard, holding the reins in one hand, shaking hands with a student with the other, giving Charles directions with his mouth—at least that part not occupied with an apple; for since apples were plenty he has made it a practice to drive with one rein in the right hand and the other in the left, with an apple in each, biting them alternately, thus raising and lowering the reins like threads on a loom. Away we go, Charley horse on a full canter down the long hill, the carriage bouncing and bounding over the stones, father alternately telling Tom how to get the harness mended and showing me the true doctrine of original sin. Hurrah! we thunder alongside the boat just in time.... Yesterday the Synod was constituted Old School. Moderator by a majority of seven, under his administration the system is beginning to assume form and becomes apparent. All the committees are one way, and the whole aspect of affairs shows you that there is a deep-laid, regular plan, and the elders are all drilled in. The committee give leave of absence to all New School men, and refuse all others, so that they may increase and we decrease.

“It is Tuesday morning and everybody is talking, planning, plotting—all bustle; heads together; knots at every corner; hands going up and down, and faces approaching earnestly or drawing back in doubt; one taking hold of the other’s coat, leading off into one corner for a particular argument; elders receiving drill, some bolting the collar. Here, in my room, are father, George, and Mr. Rankin. They are looking over the ground, prognosticating, arranging for the onset, or for the reception of 153an onset.... I never saw so many faces of clergymen, and so few of them intellectual faces.... And the elders are just what forty or fifty common farmers would be supposed to be—except that for eldership the soberest men are chosen, and, as stupidity is usually graced with more gravity than great good sense, the body of elders are not quite so acute in look as the higher class of workingmen.”

Although written in a playful mood, it is evident that he had no fancy for such work, and as he advanced his dislike increased. The broad, kindly, hospitable living, the strong, practical, sympathetic preaching, and the honest dislike of all the rattle of ecclesiastical machinery, which marked his after-life, came naturally from the training he received on the outside of Lane Seminary.

The influences of the place in which he lived as well as of the times were powerful factors in his theological education. The great West, with its boundless possibilities which had so moved the spirit of his father, lay before him, and stirred his imagination as at an earlier period the sea had done. And, as when he looked out upon the broad Atlantic from the wharves of Boston he had felt the impulse to go forth to be a sailor, command ships, and fight naval battles, so did the movement of the great streams of population Westward, and the vast field that stretched out before him like the ocean, move his spirit to go forth upon the sea of human life and conquer for Christ.

In this period of theological study, when the most of students withdraw themselves as much as possible from real life, he was brought to face it in some of its most intense forms. Cincinnati was then the central and most important city of the great West; an immense commerce was carried on from its wharves; it was the point where gathered the multitudes that were going out to occupy the new territory; it was still the rendezvous for frontiersmen; more than this, it lay upon the border-land between the free and slave States, and already felt the uneasiness and bitterness of the irresistible conflict. Chain-gangs of slaves were continually passing on the decks of the steamboats, to be sold down South, and fugitives from bondage were keeping the sympathy or the hatred of the people in continual activity. Life of high pressure and in great variety was presented to Henry Ward Beecher there in the heart of the great West in the years 154of 1834-1837; life that was very real, and that called not so much for fine-spun theories as for practical forces; not for dead and formal dogmas, but for living truth, for Him who is both Life and Truth.

True, he might have measurably kept himself from it and immured himself in the library and class-rooms of the Seminary, but he followed an entirely opposite course; he lectured, wrote anti-slavery editorials, joined the citizens’ body of police for the preservation of order, every way keeping himself in sympathy with the stirring times in which he lived, and they helped to make him the living, practical preacher he afterwards became.

His Bible-class, to which he gave great attention, both in preparation and in teaching the lesson, afforded him a field for the application of the truths he had learned, and for testing the methods he had adopted.

Yet for the most of the time his mind was not settled. His ideal of the Christian ministry was so high that he sometimes despaired of ever attaining it, and at times he seems to have seriously contemplated giving up his preparation for the ministry and of devoting himself to some other pursuit. Mrs. Beecher says that through these years his letters were very full of the discomforts and doubts that troubled him. “... Sometimes I think I shall not succeed in anything. If, when my course here is finished, they will not license me, suppose I go far West, enter a homestead (?), clear the wood off, build a little log hut, work during the week, and hunt up the settlers and hold conference and prayer meetings—will you come to me if that is all I can offer you?” Then, perhaps, in the next letter: “I will preach, if it is in the by-ways and hedges; but oh! for more light to see my way clear!” “During the last two years his letters had less of this depression. He would preach, whether men would hear or whether they would forbear.” “But I must preach the Gospel as it is revealed to me, not as it is laid down in the schools.”

He gives his experience in these words:

“During the latter part of my stay in college my feelings were unsettled. Sometimes they inclined one way and sometimes the other, until I went to Lane Seminary. I was then twenty years old, and there came a great revulsion in me from all this inchoate, unregulated, undirected experience in religion. My mind took one tremendous spring over into scepticism, and I said: ‘I have 155been a fool long enough.’ I refused to be any longer played upon in such a way. It was bitter, it was malignant, it was sad, it was sorrowful; but it was wholesale, and swept away ten thousand fictions and external observances. I said: ‘I will not stir one step further than I can see my way, and I will not stand a moment where I cannot see the truth. I will have something that is sure and steadfast.’ Having taken that ground, I was in that state of mind for the larger part of two years.

“It then pleased God to lift upon me such a view of Christ as one whose nature and office it is to have infinite and exquisite pity upon the weakness and want of sinners as I had never had before. I saw that He had compassion upon them because they were sinners, and because He wanted to help them out of their sins. It came to me like the bursting forth of spring. It was as if yesterday there was not a bird to be seen or heard, and as if to-day the woods were full of singing birds. 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 did not at first fill the whole heaven; it came as a rift along the horizon; gradually, little by little, the cloud rolled up. It was three years before the whole sky was cleared so that I could see all around, but from that hour I felt that God had a father’s heart; that Christ loved me in my sin; that while I was a sinner He did not frown upon me nor cast me off, but cared for me with unutterable tenderness, and would help me out of sin; and it seemed to me that I had everything I needed. When that vision was vouchsafed to me I felt that there was no more for me to do but to love, trust, and adore; nor has there ever been in my mind a doubt since that I did love, trust, and adore. There has been an imperfect comprehension, there have been grievous sins, there have been long defections; but never for a single moment have I doubted the power of Christ’s love to save me, any more than I have doubted the existence in the heaven of the sun by day and the moon by night.”

We have thus followed Henry Ward Beecher from the cradle to the moment that he stands prepared to enter upon his life-work; have noted every step of his course from the hills to the sea, from school to college, from the East to the West; have 156marked the influences of the home, of nature, of the city, of school, college, and seminary, of the times, of the Word and Spirit of God; have traced his experiences, felt his dawning strength, examined the life he lived, the dispositions he manifested, the hopes he cherished, and the character he formed; and in our confidence and admiration choose, as not inappropriate for him at this time, the description of “The Patrone of true Holinesse” in the “Faerie Queene”:

Call to Preach—License—Examination by Miami Presbytery—Refusal to Subscribe to Old School—Ordination by Oxford Presbytery—Visit East—Marriage—Housekeeping.

In the early spring of 1837 Mr. Beecher graduated from Lane Seminary. In accordance with the practice of the Presbyterian Church, a clergyman might be licensed to preach, even though not ordained; but such license could only be obtained after the applicant had appeared before the Presbytery for examination, and he was required also to read a “trial lecture,” as it was called. Agreeably to this custom, upon graduating from the Seminary Mr. Beecher went before the Cincinnati Presbytery, was examined, and read his “trial lecture.” The examination and lecture seem to have been satisfactory, for he was duly licensed to preach.

For a few weeks prior to his examination for license he preached in a little hall at Covington, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati. He seriously contemplated settling there as soon as he should be licensed.

“After preaching there [Covington] three or four Sundays I was called, by Martha Sawyer, a Yankee woman, to go to Lawrenceburg and preach. There was a church in that place, composed of about twenty members, of which she was the factotum. She collected the money, she was the treasurer, she was the manager, she was the trustee, she was the everything of that church.”

At this time the pulpit of the little, struggling Presbyterian church at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, was vacant, and one of the ladies of that church came up to Cincinnati to see if Bishop Little could not secure for them a pastor. The good bishop introduced her to young Henry Ward Beecher. This led to his preaching one or two trial sermons at Lawrenceburg. The result of the experiment seemed to be satisfactory on both sides, although the first sermon was said to have been a lamentable failure through the nervous apprehensions of the young preacher in facing the unusually large audience of one hundred persons.

158In May, 1837, he moved to Lawrenceburg and began preaching regularly as a licentiate, not yet ordained.

It may not be uninteresting to read just here the brief memoranda from the journal which he was keeping then:

“May 4 [1837].—Returned from Lawrenceburg. I think seriously of settling there—a destitute place indeed....

“If I go to Lawrenceburg, remember you can gain men easily if you get round their prejudices and put truth in their minds; but never if you attack prejudices. Look well at this....

”Mem.—My people must be alert to make the church agreeable, to give seats and wait on strangers, etc.“

”June 15, Thursday.—To-day received call from Lawrenceburg, and a very flattering call it was and did my heart good. Meeting called June 12, 1837; about 30 persons present. Mr. Hunt, moderator; D. S. Mayer, sec. Vote for me unanimous. Blank filled for $250, with but one dissenting voice (he voting for double that sum).“

”Monday, July 10.—Sat. eve., 8th, arrived here permanently to remain....

“I mean to write down little plans and devices for pastoral labor as they occur; I may else forget them.

“1. In different districts get men quietly to feel themselves responsible for progress of temperance or Sunday-schools.

“2. Quietly to visit from house to house and secure congregations.

“3. Secure a large congregation. Let this be the first thing. For this—

“1. Preach well uniformly.

“2. Visit widely and produce a personal attachment; also wife do same.

“3. Get the young to love me.

“4. See that the church have this presented as a definite thing, and set them to this work just as directly as I would to raising a fund, building, etc.

“4. Little girls’ societies for benevolent purposes.”

The town was small, scarce fifteen hundred inhabitants, located at the junction of the Ohio and Miami rivers—just across the Miami from Ohio on the east, and the Ohio River from Kentucky on the south—subject to devastating floods from both rivers impartially.

159The church was small, with meagre accommodations, the people poor. We quote his description of the place and church:

“You can form some conception of that field when I tell you that it was a place where they had four gigantic distilleries, from which was carried to market a steamboat-load of liquor every day. When I went there and entered upon my vocation of preaching, I found a church, occupying a little brick building, with nineteen or twenty members. There was one man, and the rest were women. With the exception of two persons, there was not one of them who was not obliged to gain a livelihood by the labor of the hands. So you will understand how very poor they were. I could not, of course, obtain my living in so small a church, and in a community that was not overblessed with wealth. I was taken up, therefore, as a pensioner by the Home Missionary Society, and my first two years were spent in the field as a missionary, in part supported by the funds of this society.

“I was sexton in the church. There were no lamps there, so I went and bought some, and filled them and lit them. I swept the church and lighted my own fires. I did not ring the bell, because there was none. I opened the church before every meeting, and shut and locked it after every meeting. I took care of everything in the church.”

Here in this little frontier village, then upon the very borders of civilization, began his real work. For twenty-four years he had been preparing for this step. Now it must be determined whether his life should be a success or a failure.

The year passed uneventfully, and it was not until September, 1838, when he applied for ordination, that he got his first taste of trouble.

At this time the division between the Old School and the New School Presbyterian churches was about to take place, and two General Assemblies, afterwards called the Old School General Assembly and the New School General Assembly, were, a short time later, convened in Philadelphia. A resolution was introduced into the Oxford Presbytery that no man should be licensed or ordained by that body who did not connect himself with the Old School Presbyterian Church, dropping from their care those who declined to do so.

160This resolution, it was thought, was probably aimed at Mr. Beecher^[3]—an attempt to strike the father over the shoulders of his son. For the actual division and separation of the Presbyterian Church into Old and New School was in no small measure the result of the controversy carried on for several years previously against Dr. Lyman Beecher. The doctor in 1832 had, as we have seen, accepted the presidency and professorship of doctrinal theology in Lane Seminary. He had been brought up in, and had been connected with, the Congregational Church until this time. While he entertained no revolutionary spirit, he had some expectation that the free spirit of New England thought, and that loving spirit of voluntary co-operation which he had enjoyed so in his New England pastorate, might be infused into the forms of Presbyterianism. The idea of an intimate friendship and co-operation between the Congregational and Presbyterian churches in the United States had always been dear to him.

But when he went to Cincinnati there had already commenced in different quarters a movement aiming at greater stringency and the expulsion from the Presbyterian Church of what was called the New England element, of which Dr. Beecher was an eminent representative. His settlement at Lane Seminary was followed by a more active demonstration of hostility. Formal charges of heresy, slander, and hypocrisy were preferred against him, to which reference has already been made.

These proceedings produced a very markedly unfavorable impression in the public mind against Presbyterianism. They had only ended at about the time his son, Henry Ward, came to Lawrenceburg.

There was a good deal of feeling in the two branches of the Presbyterian Church, and when Mr. Beecher applied to the Oxford Presbytery, within whose jurisdiction Lawrenceburg was located, a good deal of interest was aroused. A son of Dr. Lyman Beecher was to be examined by a presbytery known to be in marked hostility to him. It would be a good chance to 161demonstrate the laxity and heterodoxy of Dr. Beecher. For, of course, the young man would only reflect the father’s views.

The presbytery duly met in session in September, 1838, and Henry Ward appeared before them. Writing to his brother George, he refers to his examination. After telling of his family affairs he says:

“So much for family news—a quiet lake; now for public affairs—a troubled ocean casting up mud and dirt.

“I went some sixty miles up into Preble County, near Eaton, before Oxford Presbytery. Presented my papers. Father Craigh was appointed to squeak the questions. They examined me to their hearts’ content. I was a model to behold, and so were they! Elders opened their mouths, gave their noses a fresh blowing, fixed their spectacles, and hitched forward on their seats. The ministers clinched their confessions of faith with desperate fervor and looked unutterably orthodox, while Graham and a few friendly ones looked a little nervous, not knowing how the youth would stand fire. There he sat, the young candidate begotten of a heretic, nursed at Lane; but, with such a name and parentage and education, what remarkable modesty, extraordinary meekness, and how deferential to the eminently acute questioners who sat gazing upon the prodigy! Certainly this was a bad beginning. Having predetermined that I should be hot and forward and full of confidence, it was somewhat awkward, truly, to find such gentleness and teachableness!

“Then came the examination: ‘Will the mon tell us in what relation Adam stood to his posterity?’ ‘In the relation of a federal head.’ ‘What do you mean by a federal head?’ ‘A head with whom God made a covenant for all his posterity.’ Then questions on all the knotty points. ‘Still the wonder grew,’ for the more the lad was examined the more incorrigibly orthodox did he grow, until they began to fear he was a leetle too orthodox upon some points. What was to be done? The vote on receiving me was unanimous! Well, they slept upon it. Next day, while settling the time of my ordination, Prof. McArthur, of Oxford, moved to postpone the business to take up some resolutions. In the first they ‘sincerely adhered to the Old School Pby. Assembly’; second, required that all licentiates and candidates under their care should do the same or be no longer such. I declined acknowledging it to be the true one. Father Craigh 162(whom my orthodoxy had softened) said they would give me six months to think and decide, and I might continue to preach in their bounds. I refused, and they turned me out and gave me my papers back again. I asked them what the duty of my church was. They replied that it was vacant—just what they had to say, and just what I wanted them to say, and, moreover, just what I determined they should say. I drove home forthwith; got back on Saturday. On Sunday recounted from the pulpit the doings of Pby., and declared them vacant if they continued under Oxford; appointed a meeting for Wednesday P.M. for their action. By a unanimous vote they withdrew from Oxford and declared themselves an Independent Pbyn. ch. Now for Synod. The Old School called a convention to meet two days before Synod met; cut out a series of resolutions going for O. S. Assembly, cutting off those who had officially joined the Constitutional Assembly, etc., etc. After sermon by Jno. Rankin, Stowe and Coe nominated for moderator—Stowe 47, Coe 70. The New School then determined simply to urge on to voting. All speaking was on one side. When they had passed the resolutions to the one cutting off all who had joined N. S. Assembly they inserted a new one, by which majority of Cincinnati Presbytery were ejected! Jno. Rankin then rose and declared the body dissolved,dissolved, and as moderator of last Synod would give them time to leave the house, and would then form the true Synod. They prayed and adjourned to Wilson’s. It was queer. ‘Synod of Cincinnati will adjourn to meet at 7 in 1st Pby. ch.’; ‘Synod Cin. will now come to order,’ etc. I left after this and both bodies were still in session. I stepped in a moment Saturday morning just before leaving, and they were then passing in our Synod a resolution not to allow any slave-holder in our connection. Mills agreed to it. I did not wait to hear votes, but presume it was nearly unanimous. Synod declared the whole ground formerly held by Oxford Pby. to be held by the Cin. Pby. Stowe has just written me that Graham, Thomas, Chidlow, Merril, Crothers, Dickey, and others have formally withdrawn from the Old School Synod, but not yet united with ours. This is a brief sketch of matters ecclesiastical. Pby. of Cin. will begin their new authority over former territory of Oxford Pby., by coming here to ordain me on Thurs., Nov. 8 [1838].”

The New School Presbytery met in Cincinnati, and before 163this body Mr. Beecher applied for ordination, the minutes of which record that it ordained and installed him November 9, 1838, over the independent church at Lawrenceburg, Dr. Lyman Beecher presiding, Dr. Blanchard charging the pastor, and Dr. Calvin E. Stowe, his brother-in-law, charging the people.

Mr. Beecher felt that the division in the Church was wholly uncalled for, but naturally was unwilling to desert the school to which he was attached by its more liberal and democratic policy, by the associations of his education, and the ties of filial love and admiration. The bitterness of this controversy in the body of the Church, and the utter folly of a great Church, organized for the work of saving men’s souls, wasting its strength in harsh recriminations and angry feuds over matters which seemed to him of minor importance, and finally splitting the Church into two hostile bodies, produced a profound impression upon Mr. Beecher’s mind, and developed rapidly that trait, doubtless then latent, which has so markedly characterized his preaching since then—a disregard of mere forms, provided he could secure the substance. And so he grew to look upon all denominations as his brethren, wholly disregarding the formal differences that existed, rejoicing heartily in all their successes, and wishing them God-speed, seeing only the objects for which all labored—the enlightenment of the world, the saving of mankind. He was always willing to co-operate. He never withheld his hand or voice, when there was a chance to help a struggling church, because it was of a different denomination from his own.

He gave another account of these experiences and their effect upon his mind, in some remarks at one of his Friday-night meetings, suggested by the meeting, in the spring of 1869, of the Assemblies of the Old and New Schools, and their reunion as one body at that time:

“My whole life has more or less taken its color from the controversy which led to the division of the Old School and the New School Presbyterians. I was brought up in New England, a minister’s son, the son of a minister who was doctrinally inclined and whose warmest friends were great doctrinarians. My father’s household was substantially a debating society. As early as I can remember I knew enough to discuss foreordination, and I could do it as well as my betters. I could go just as far as they could, could run against snags at the same spots that they did, 164and could not get off any better than they could. All those great doctrines which tend powerfully to enlarge the imagination and to sharpen the reason without feeding them were, I had almost said, matters of daily conversation in my father’s family. When I went to college I fell under the influence of a young minister who became an Old School Presbyterian. He was a man of large brain and marked ability. He had a naturally philosophic mind. He was noble-hearted and genial. I remember that my poetic temperament, alongside of his rigorous, logical temperament, used to seem to me mean and contemptible. I thought he was like a big oak-tree, while I was more like a willow, half-grown and pliant, yielding to every force that was exerted upon it. At any rate, he had a powerful influence upon my development. But as I came to the possession of myself more and more I took on the logical methods in the exercise of the reasoning faculty which God had implanted in me, and they came near wrecking me; for I became sceptical, not malignantly but honestly, and it was to me a matter of great distress and anguish. It continued for years, and no logic ever relieved me. My brother Charles went through the same process, and he came back in the same way that I did, through the instrumentality of a living Saviour. An abstract, philosophical statement of the truth never met my wants, but when there arose over the horizon a vision of the Lord Jesus Christ as a living Friend, who had the profoundest personal interest in me, I embraced that view and was lifted up. My heart did for me then what my head had failed to do. This was an experience which has constituted one of the greatest affirmative forces that have acted on my mind in preaching. All my life long I have had a strong disposition to so preach the truth as to meet the wants of men who stand not only outside of the churches but outside of belief. I suppose that as long as I live I shall think of the truth, not as it looks to those that are within the Church, but as it looks to those that are outside of the Church and outside of belief itself.

“This has given to my preaching an element of naturalism. It has led me to seek for a ground on which I could stand and bring men to a knowledge of the love of Christ. I have gone far from the usual narrow ecclesiastical and theological rules to broader social methods by which men that are doubters can be reached.

“My first settlement as a pastor was at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, 165where I was two years in the Presbyterian Church. When I left Lane Seminary I went down there to preach, and I thought nothing about Church connection. My business, as I supposed, was to preach what little I knew and to lead men to the Saviour; but I soon felt, for the first time, the authority of the Church. I had not been ground; I was nothing but corn, and I had to be run through a mill. This Lawrenceburg church was in the territory of the Miami Presbytery. The Presbytery was not only a body of Presbyterians, but was composed of Old School Presbyterians; not only were they Old School Presbyterians, but they were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians; and not only were they straight, but they bent like a hoop the other way. I had received an ordination license at the Cincinnati Presbytery—where my father belonged at that time—in about 1837; but it was necessary that I should undergo another examination. The Assemblies had not then divided; there was only the one Church; but there were two parties—the Old School and the New School. There was the one great body, but there were these two sections. There were presbyteries and synods of the New School, and there were presbyteries and synods of the Old School; but they were under the same authority.

“I went on horseback from Lawrenceburg to Oxford, where the Presbytery was in session. And, by the way, I came near losing my life in crossing the river. The water was high, and I was thrown into it; but I got out and dried off, and started again, and reached my destination without any further mishap, and went through my examination.

“At that time, under the instruction which I had had in my father’s family, under the college drill that I had gone through, and under the training to which I was subjected in Lane Seminary, I had become so familiar with the doctrines of theology that it was difficult for any one to put me down in a discussion of them. I could state them very glibly. I was ready with an explanation of every single point connected with them. I knew all their proofs, all their dodging cuts, all their ins and outs. Therefore I had no trouble in standing my ground with the men who examined me. They knew they had Dr. Beecher’s son before them; the questions came like hail, and I was very willing. Somehow I have always had a certain sympathy with human nature which has led me invariably, in my better moods, to see 166instinctively, or to perceive by intuition, how to touch the right chord in people, how to reach the living principle in them; and that faculty was fully awakened in me on this occasion. I recollect that the presiding clergyman at that Presbytery was a man that I had seen at my father’s house and that I had taken a sort of fancy to. He was probably fifty or sixty years of age. He was tall, and was thin in the face, and he had a shrill, ringing voice. I felt that he was like a file; but still I liked him. Well, he put questions to me. Some of them I answered directly, some ingeniously, some intelligently, and others somewhat obscurely. The examination extended over two or three hours; and I thought I perceived a warming and melting influence among those men. I was quite indifferent as to whether or not I came out with their endorsement, and I have a recollection of feeling very fine. They questioned, and questioned, and questioned; and it happened that the points on which they were very particular were man’s sinfulness, the influence of the Holy Ghost, its necessity, its work, the thoroughness of it, and so on.

“Now, I was always immensely orthodox—thunderingly so; and when they thought they were going to get heresy they got a perfect avalanche of orthodoxy. This man whom I had seen at father’s was quite carried away with me; he shielded me and helped me over some rough places; and the Presbytery, without a dissenting voice, voted that I was orthodox—to their amazement and mine!

“I thought then that the bitterness of death was past, when lo! a professor from Oxford University, Miami, introduced a resolution, which was passed, that that Presbytery would not license nor ordain any candidate who would not give in his adhesion to the Old School Presbyterian General Assembly. It was on that point that the Old and New Schools divided, and I, being my father’s son, spurned the idea of going over to the Old School; I felt as big as forty men; and when that resolution passed I simply said: ‘Well, brethren, I have nothing to do but to go back to my father’s house.’ They were kind to me; they seemed to have conceived an affection for the young man; they took the greatest pains to conciliate me; they endeavored to smooth the way for me, and tried to persuade me to comply with their wish; but I was determined, and said, ‘I won’t.’ I always had the knack of saying that and sticking to it!

167“So I turned my back on the Oxford Presbytery, and rode to Lawrenceburg again; and the next Sunday morning I announced to my congregation the result of my week’s pilgrimage, told them of the vote which declared their church vacant, and said to them: ‘Now, brethren, one of two things is necessary: you must get somebody else to preach for you, or you must declare yourselves independent of the Presbyterian Church.’ It was no sooner said than done. Before sundown on that day they declared themselves an independent church, and I decided to stay with them. I was then ordained by the New School Presbytery in Cincinnati, after which I went on with my work regularly.

“Preceding all this, you should recollect that during the three years that I was in the Seminary the controversy between the Old and New School Presbyterians ran very high on questions of theology and on questions of Church authority. I had been stuffed with these things. I had eaten and drank them. I had chopped and hewed them. I had built up from them every sort of argument. I had had them ad nauseam.

“When I went out into the field I found all the little churches ready to divide, such was the state of feeling throughout the whole West. Going into my work in the midst of that state of affairs, I made up my mind distinctly that, with the help of God, I would never engage in any religious contention. I remember riding through the woods for long, dreary days, and I recollect at one time coming out into an open place where the sun shone down through to the bank of the river, and where I had such a sense of the love of Christ, of the nature of His work on earth, of its beauty and its grandeur, and such a sense of the miserableness of Christian men quarrelling and seeking to build up antagonistic churches—in other words, the kingdom of Christ rose up before my mind with such supreme loveliness and majesty—that I sat in my saddle, I do not know how long (many, many minutes; perhaps half an hour), and there, all alone, in a great forest of Indiana, probably twenty miles from any house, prayed for that kingdom, saying audibly, ‘I will never be a sectary.’ I remember promising Christ that if He would strengthen me and teach me how to work I would all my life long preach for His kingdom and endeavor to love everybody who was doing that work. Not that I would accept others’ belief, not that I would 168embrace their theology, not that I would endorse their ecclesiastical organizations; but whatever their instruments might be, if they were sincerely working for the kingdom of Christ I would never put a straw in their way and never strike a blow to their harm. By the grace of God I have kept that resolution to this day. There was so much good that came from the discussions and quarrels of the Old and New Schools by which at that period of my ministry I was surrounded. So much for the influence on my mind of those early scenes and experiences, which were more, in some respects, a theological school to me than Lane Seminary itself was.”

Mr. Beecher at the Time of his Marriage.

169Such was the beginning of his ministry.

We may now retrace our steps a little to take a look at the beginning of his domestic life.

For seven years, like Jacob of old, he had labored, waiting for the time when he could claim his wife. Of course, until he was settled somewhere with some definite income, it was folly to think of marrying. But when he began preaching on trial at Lawrenceburg, and it seemed probable that he might be called there, his mind ran forward to when, having a definite home, he might go East for his bride. In his journal we find one of his written reveries:

Mrs. Beecher at the Time of her Marriage.

“Spring, March 1, 1837.—The winter has gone. Spring has come—the time of the singing of birds. How vividly does that little expression call up the whole scene—the bright sun, the mild air, the heaven full of sweet influences, and the green sprouting grass among patches of snow, and the swelling buds! Every voice echoes in the air, and all sounds are mellow. The falling of a plank, the pound of a hammer or beetle, the rumble of a wagon, all, this morning, sound like joyful music. But I have 170one thought sweeter than any of these, which makes these sweet: it is that now only spring and summer are to fly before I meet my dear wife, not again to be parted, except by death!”

In July, 1837, having been formally called, though before his ordination—it then being apparent that he was to be definitely settled at Lawrenceburg—he wrote to Miss Bullard, suggesting that their marriage be celebrated shortly after his ordination, which was then expected to be in the following September. He had no sooner written and mailed the letter when he said to himself, as he explained to his wife later: “Why should I wait for my ordination? Why not have my wife present at it? And I started that very afternoon.”

His letter reached Miss Bullard in the morning of Saturday, July 29, and he himself appeared in the evening of the same day, to the great surprise of all. His plan was explained, and after a hasty discussion August 3 was fixed on for the wedding, and three o’clock in the afternoon the hour.

“I was expected to be ready to leave in the afternoon of August 3,” writes Mrs. Beecher. “The wedding-dress and wedding-cake were to be made—for what New England damsel could be married without wedding-cake? At one o’clock Monday morning I began my work, sewing until the family were up. After the breakfast was over the materials for the wedding-cake were brought from the village store, and Henry and I began the work for the cake. He picked over and stoned the raisins—taking abundant toll while doing it—beating the eggs, and in every way made himself useful, and kept the whole family in good spirits and cheerful, when, but for him, in such hurried preparations we might have felt the great exertion severely. But the work was done, and the 3d of August dawned bright and rosy.

“Very few guests were invited outside of the brothers and sisters, with their families, who were near enough to the old home to reach us. Both my sisters were married in a storm, and I had always said I would not be. Three o’clock was the hour appointed for the wedding. About two a heavy thunder-shower came on, and it began to rain, thunder, and lighten. At three o’clock we were summoned, but I said: ‘Wait until the storm passes,’ and, in spite of their remonstrance, they did wait. At four o’clock the clouds broke away and the sun appeared, and we were ushered into the parlor, Henry and I together. Just as we 171were entering the door (it was very warm, and door and windows all open) a rainbow, the most brilliant I ever saw, and so remarked by all in the room, seemed through the open window to span the parlor, and the spectators said we walked under its arch to our places. In his prayer the clergyman spoke of the ‘bow of peace and promise,’ which he hoped was the beautiful symbol of what our lives were to be.

“We rode to Worcester after the long farewells were said, not expecting to meet the home friends again for years.”

A few days later Mr. Beecher wrote from New York to his sister, Mrs. Stowe:

Leaving New York, they started westward, partly by rail, partly by steamer, and not a little by the slow method of the canal; travelled day and night, until they finally reached Cincinnati the last of August.

From Mrs. Beecher’s memory we obtain her impressions of their first pastorate:

“We remained a few days at Walnut Hills, and then took the little steamer with a free pass to Lawrenceburg. We were to board for the present, as we did not think that eighteen cents in pocket and three hundred dollars a year prospective salary would enable us to begin housekeeping. Lawrenceburg was a small place on the Miami.

“Mr. Beecher was obliged to take charge of that part of the building in which he was to preach. Together we went every Saturday afternoon, swept and dusted the room, filled the lard-oil lamps, and laid the wood and kindlings ready for him to start the fire the next morning before service, when needed; for the members of the church were all, except a few families, poor laboring people, with all they could attend to at home.

“But curiosity to hear the young preacher filled the room the first Sabbath, and from that time it continued to be filled—crowded. The Methodist church had always been the fashionable church, where the wealthy and more refined part of the population worshipped. This little Presbyterian church had almost died out, and, when first requested to preach there, neither Mr. Beecher nor the people had any thought of his coming for more than that one Sabbath. But his manner of preaching was so very 173different from what they had been accustomed to—so original—that they wanted to hear him again, and after that they gave him a call to settle there. The Home Missionary Society were to give $150, and the little band who composed the church thought they could manage to raise $150—in all $300—and the call was accepted, notwithstanding the remonstrance of friends in Cincinnati. They were more ambitious for him than he was for himself, knowing that he could doubtless, in a short time, get a better settlement. They knew, also, he intended to marry as soon as his theological course was finished, and thought him wild to think of bringing a wife out West and expect to be able to live on three hundred dollars a year. But from the first he acted up to the advice he always gave in after-years to young graduates from theological seminaries: ‘Don’t hang round idle, waiting for a good offer. Enter the first field God opens for you. If He needs you in a larger one He will open the gate for you to enter.’ And so he did.

“From his first sermon^[4] in Lawrenceburg that little room was crowded. He did not extemporize so entirely, at first, as in later years—at least he wrote more copious notes—but those who knew him can well imagine that when warmed up by his subject his notes did not hold him very closely.

“How vividly I recall that first Sabbath! How young, how boyish he did look! And how indignant I felt, when some of the ‘higher classes’ came in out of simple curiosity, to see the surprised, almost scornful looks that were interchanged!

“He read the first hymn, and read it well—as they had never heard their own ministers (often illiterate, uneducated men) read hymns. I watched the expression change on their faces. Then the first prayer! It was a revelation to them, and when he began the sermon the critical expression had vanished, and they evidently settled themselves to hear in earnest.

“The next Sunday the interest was still more strongly marked. His preaching was to them something unusual. It was evident the hearers were not quite at ease. He woke them up, and they were not quite prepared to decide whether they were anxious to be so thoroughly aroused. They were not exactly comfortable, and some went away, after the services were over, a little irritated and half-decided never to hear him again.

“The next Sabbath they concluded it would not hurt them 174to go just this one time more, and from that time were constant attendants. The satisfaction with this young preacher increased, and many from all sects came regularly.”

On his return from the East with his young wife, not feeling that they could afford to undertake housekeeping, he accepted the hospitality of one of his elders, who had offered him a room in his house. There they lived for some little time, when the sudden death of a member of the family and the necessity of a change in the good elder’s domestic arrangements required the use of this room.

At this time Mr. Beecher was attending a synodical meeting at Cincinnati. Mrs. Beecher set to work at once to get board elsewhere. Failing in this, she sought to hire rooms. After hunting until nearly exhausted she secured the refusal of two rooms over a stable down by the banks of the Miami, which had been occupied by the hostler, rental forty dollars per annum.

She immediately took the boat to Cincinnati, and then, being too poor to hire a wagon, she walked to Walnut Hills, four miles from Cincinnati—which was then the home of the Beecher family—to report on the state of affairs to her husband. A hasty examination of his finances showed just sixty-eight cents. As they had no household furniture of any kind, the prospect was not alluring. But an ability to get along somehow was a characteristic of those days. Friends, though not over-rich themselves, were able each to furnish something. One supplied half of an old carpet, another some knives and forks, a third a few sheets and pillow-cases, then a bedstead, a stove; and little by little, before they returned home that night, there was gathered together enough to meet the absolute requirements of living. Later the sale of Mrs. Beecher’s cloak realized thirty dollars. The salary, though nominally $500 per annum, was in fact but $300, of which one-half was paid by the Home Missionary Society, and neither half paid with great regularity. Any industrious day-laborer of modern times would have been ill-content with either income or home possessions.

Returning from Walnut Hills, the next thing was to cleanse the rooms and settle down. Mrs. Beecher gives a graphic account of their first housekeeping: “When we reached our former boarding-house we found our good friends with whom we had boarded very blue because their pastor and wife could find no 175better rooms; but the lady was a true New England woman and knew how soon a little hard labor would change the looks of the rooms. Old Toby, their colored man, brought round, the next morning, two pails and scrub-brushes and plenty of soap, and Henry and I went to work with great energy. Think of father with sleeves rolled up, a big apron on, scrubbing the floors! But I confess I never had known anything so hard to clean. Tobacco-stains and all manner of dirt that might have been looked for from the former occupants was so soaked into the floor that it seemed impossible to remove the stains. I asked the landlord if we might get some paint and paint the floors. ‘Oh! no. That would injure the wood!’

“In a day or two the rooms were as clean as faithful, hard work could make them, and after our last breakfast with our kind friends we bade them good-morning, with thanks and a blessing, and went to get our furniture, which the good captain of the steamboat had stored until we were ready. With it came some groceries, wash-tubs, and a nice painted dining-table, and a husk mattress, and husk pillows.

“‘Where did these last things come from?’ said your father.

“‘Part of my cloak,’ I replied, ‘but not all of it.’

“The kitchen-window looked out on a large back-yard that could be made a fine one with a little care, but among the rubbish I espied an old three-legged table and something that looked like the remains of small hanging shelves. I ran down stairs and asked the landlady if they had been thrown aside as worthless. ‘Oh! yes. They are good for nothing.’ ‘Then may I have them?’ ‘Certainly. But on examination you will find them of no use.’

“I washed and cleaned them well, and called to Henry to take them up-stairs to our rooms. By the table I found the broken leg. With very little trouble the table was repaired, the hanging shelves put up, and both varnished. They proved to be mahogany, and when the varnish was dry they looked quite nice. Among your father’s very scanty wardrobe was an old coat past any mending. I took the skirt, cleaned it, and put it on the top of the table, and fastened the sides and ends with some strips of kid that I had brought from home. It did look quite fine, and you can hardly imagine how much pride and pleasure your father had with his writing-table.

176“The long boxes made in Amherst expressly to pack his books in when he came West were well made of planed boards. These we set one atop of the other, open side out, and filled with books bought by his own labors while in college, teaching school, and making speeches. These made quite a fine addition to the room which was to be the parlor, study, and our bed-room all in one.

“In the back room was a cook-stove given by brother George, and the old three-quarter bedstead that your father used at Lane Seminary, now all nice and clean, curtained with some four-cent calico Mrs. Judge Burnet gave us. Henry made the upright posts and ran a large wire round it on which the curtain was hung, with a wide tape all round the top on which our clothes were pinned. Crosswise from the door to the chimney a piece of four-cent calico curtained the corner where wash-benches and tubs, flour-barrel and sugar-barrel (the two last sent in by good friends) were placed, and over the door leading to the loft in the adjoining store your father had nailed some large pieces to hold saddle, bridle, and buffalo-robe. On the other side of the range was a good dish-closet, and in front a sink.

“So these two small rooms, at first so repulsive, were becoming quite a pleasant home. The house was situated very near the boat-landing on the wharf of the Miami River—too near for comfort when freshets swept down in that direction, but a pleasant outlook across on to the Kentucky hills; the river sometimes so low that your father has walked across and gathered flowers in Kentucky, then again rising so as to sweep everything before it as it did two years ago, utterly obliterating all that portion of Lawrenceburg where we lived.”

We are indebted to the Rev. John H. Thomas, the present pastor of Mr. Beecher’s old church in Lawrenceburg, for the impressions of his ministry there, as gathered from the reminiscences of his surviving parishioners:

“Mr. Beecher made his mark immediately. His youthful appearance—he was but twenty-three—and his careless dress may have raised doubts as to his ability when his hearers first saw him, but they disappeared as soon as he began to speak. The characteristics of his later oratory were all present from the first—fluency, glowing rhetoric, abundance of illustrations, witty points, brilliant ideas. From the first he filled the church. Merchants 177told their customers of the talented young preacher, and they would come miles to hear him. He was annoyed at interruptions, and when late-comers appeared he would stop speaking till they were seated.

“His personal habits were as original and effective as his pulpit efforts. He was not what would be called a good pastor. An old pastor of the Methodist Episcopal church in Lawrenceburg said to me: ‘Mr. Beecher could outpreach me, but I could out-visit him, and visiting builds up a church more than preaching.’ The records of the church during his pastorate are yet in our hands, though in one of the great floods here the volume floated out of the submerged study of the pastor, and was found, by chance, embedded in the yellow deposit of the Ohio. It is accurately and neatly kept, in the beautiful hand of Mr. Beecher, each entry signed with his well-known autograph. The additions to the church were about on the average of other pastors.

“But outside of strictly pastoral work Mr. Beecher’s influence was felt widely and beneficially. He was universally popular. He was kindly, genial, and free with all classes. He would hunt and fish with men not used to the society of clergymen, and spent much time on the river, especially in catching drift-wood brought down in every rise. Once he called to a poor German emigrant woman that if she would bring him her clothes-line he would show her how to get her winter’s supply of fuel. She brought it, and he tied a stone to one end, and, flinging it out from the shore over logs, would draw them in. In a little while their combined efforts had brought in a dray-load.

“He was fond of talking with all sorts and conditions of men. There was an old shoemaker in the town of pronounced infidel views. Mr. Beecher would spend hours in the room where he worked, discussing with him.

“There is no evidence that he lowered in any degree his character as a Gospel minister, but plenty that his influence was felt by the neglected classes, and even by the rough elements. And in this did he not follow the example of his divine Master, of whom it was said: ‘This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them’?

“He was not unscholarly, but is remembered as a reader rather than as a student. He studied men even more than books. A Baptist minister with whom he had a discussion one Sunday is yet living here, and has told me that at the close of the discussion, 178in which the Baptist minister thought he had the best of it, Mr. Beecher waved his hand and said to the audience: ‘Well, I don’t care if you all go down to the river and get immersed.’

“His going away was esteemed a great loss. ‘Cords of people,’ says an old lady graphically, ‘were about to come into the Church.’ But Indianapolis, then with only 2,500 people, was the State capital, and was rapidly outstripping the little town on the river. It was a louder call.

“Mr. Beecher’s relations with the other ministers were happy, although he outshone them completely. He established a popular union Sunday-school, notwithstanding there was one in each church, and he often spoke in other churches.”

Mr. Beecher described his preaching there as follows:

“I preached some theology. I had just come out of the Seminary, and retained some portions of systematic theology, which I used when I had nothing else; and as a man chops straw and mixes it with Indian meal in order to distend the stomach of the ox that eats it, so I chopped a little of the regular orthodox theology, that I might sprinkle it with the meal of the Lord Jesus Christ. But my horizon grew larger and larger in that one idea of Christ. It seems to me that first I saw Christ as the Star of Bethlehem, but afterward He seemed to expand, and I saw about a quarter of the horizon filled with His light, and through years it came around so that I saw about one-half in that light; and it was not until after I had gone through two or three revivals of religion that, when I looked around, He was all and in all. And my whole ministry sprang out of that.”

At another time he said:

“I had no idea that I could preach. I never expected that I could accomplish much. I merely went to work with the feeling: ‘I will do as well as I can, and I will stick to it, if the Lord pleases, and fight His battle the best way I know how.’ And I was thankful as I could be. Nobody ever sent me a spare-rib that I did not thank God for the kindness which was shown me. I recollect when Judge ——— gave me his cast-off clothing I felt that I was sumptuously clothed. I wore old coats and second-hand shirts for two or three years, and I was not above it either, although sometimes, as I was physically a somewhat well-developed man, and the judge was thin and his legs were slim, they were rather a tight fit.

179“There was a humorous side to this, but I could easily have put a dolorous side to it. I could have said: ‘Humph! pretty business! Son of Lyman Beecher, president of a theological seminary, in this miserable hole, where there is no church, and where there are no elders and no men to make them out of! This is not according to my deserts. I could do better. I ought not to waste my talents in such a place.’ But I was delivered from any such feeling. I felt that it was an unspeakable privilege to be anywhere and speak of Christ. I had very little theology—that is to say, it slipped away from me. I knew it, but it did not do me any good. It was like an armor which had lost its buckles and would not stick on. But I had one vivid point—the realization of the love of God in Christ Jesus. And I tried to work that up in every possible shape for my people. And it was the secret of all the little success which I had in the early part of my ministry. I remember that I used to ride out in the neighborhood and preach to the destitute, and that my predominant feeling was thanksgiving that God had permitted me to preach the unsearchable riches of His grace. I think I can say that during the first ten years of my ministerial life I was in that spirit.”

Here he began a habit which he followed during the first ten years of his ministry—that of keeping a record of every sermon preached, stating the date, text, an outline of the sermon, and then the reasons why he preached that particular sermon, “as giving a kind of guide to my course by a perusal of what I have done, also to avoid repetition and to show why I made given sermons”; thus forming the habit of preparing his sermons with a view to reaching some specific object. This record, with his daily journal in which he jotted down such thoughts on religious subjects as came to his mind day by day, are now before us, and show an immense amount of painstaking care. His habit of careful analysis was of incalculable value to him later, giving a logical method to his reasoning. It was not until after he came to Brooklyn that, under the increased pressure of this larger field of work, he abandoned this habit.

The last recorded sermons we find were those preached on the morning and evening of January 5, 1848.

During the second year of his Lawrenceburg pastorate he received a call to the Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, 180at a salary of $600 per year. Though this opened up a much larger and more effective field of labor, with the means of living much more comfortably, yet, feeling that he was doing effective work where he was, he refused the call. He was always opposed to short pastorates and frequent changes: he had no faith in rolling stones.

After a short time the call was repeated and again declined. He was then urged to reconsider his refusal, and strong representations were made to him that it was his duty to accept the larger and more important field. At last, perplexed, he agreed to lay the matter before the Synod and abide by their recommendation The Synod advised that he accept the call.

Aside from the strong aversion which he felt for restless changes, and the feeling that, no matter how humble the field might be, he ought to labor there so long as there was work for the Master to engage him, he also felt a great unwillingness to leave the people to whom he was becoming strongly attached. The life there, though rude and simple, had been very happy. There his first child had been born. There for the first time he really had begun to live and work in the field he had chosen. But as he felt constrained to be guided by the advice which he had sought, on the Synod’s recommendation he accepted the call.

On the afternoon of July 28, 1839, he preached his farewell sermon at Lawrenceburg from the text: “These are the words which I spake unto you while I was yet with you.”

The New Field—Growth of Influence—Social Life—The Secret of Effective Preaching—Editorial Labors—Lectures to Young Men—Call to Brooklyn—Departure.

With a heart full of tender feelings he parted with his people and entered into the larger work in which he first became known outside of the limits of his Presbytery.

In the last week in July, 1839, he removed his family to Indianapolis, which, though it was the State capital, was hardly more than a village, having less than 4,000 inhabitants, its streets unpaved and noted for the depth and persistency of the mud. Like most of the then frontier towns, it was very malarial; chills and fever were expected as a matter of course, very rarely disappointing the expectation.

The Second Presbyterian Church was an offshoot from the “First” Church, a chip struck out by the axe of controversy, then being so fiercely waged between the Old and New Schools. The new church was of course New School. Its fifteen original members, having been released from the First Church after some little ecclesiastical difficulty, organized at once, and secured the second story of the old Marion County Seminary.

Their first call was to Rev. S. Holmes, of New Bedford, Mass.; he declined. They then invited Rev. John C. Young, of Danville, Ky., with like result. Their next call was to Henry Ward Beecher, who became their first pastor. He was then but twenty-six, looking still young, but fresh, rugged, and full of life.

To the few survivors of that little band who knew and loved him in those early days we are largely indebted for the impression produced by his preaching in this church and in the community, and for a brief account of his life among them.

“My first recollection of Mr. Beecher,” said one of his early parishioners, “was when I was a journeyman printer. A man named King came to me and, with much enthusiasm, declared he had heard the greatest preacher he had ever listened to in his 182life—a young fellow who was preaching at the Marion County Seminary.

“I went there and heard him for the first time in the spring of 1840, I suppose it was. I was, like everybody else, perfectly carried away with him. I soon formed his acquaintance, and, after he got to the new church on the Circle, became a member in the great revival of 1842. I was a printer when he delivered those lectures to young men, and in the course of printing them (I was at work in the shop where they were published) I was much in contact with him. They were published by the old jobbing house of E. Chamberlain, who was afterwards a bookseller here. The Indiana Farmer was printed in the office where I worked, published by a Quaker named Willis. Mr. Beecher was really the life and soul of it—wrote all the articles in it that were good for anything. I frequently assisted him in reading proofs. He had no practical experience as an agriculturist, except that he was thoroughly alive to every new thing. He took great pride in raising flowers, and his garden was full of plants that had never been seen here before. During his revival meetings—I think as much to test my sincerity and earnestness as anything else—he invited me to come to his house at five o’clock in the morning and breakfast with him. It was a winter morning and before daylight. Mrs. Beecher and the children were up, everything in perfect order, and breakfast ready. He called his wife and children together for family worship, and spoke and prayed in simple words. It seemed to me the most beautiful and touching thing I ever saw in my life. Mr. Beecher, I thought, was even then broad in his ideas and the most industrious man I ever knew. For a time he lived in one side of a little one-story house in the alley half a square north of Washington Street, between East and New Jersey Streets, in the rear of where the Jewish Synagogue now stands. I think there were three rooms. At another time he occupied a house that stood near the southeast corner of Pennsylvania and New York Streets. He has told me that during a malarial season he preached when he could hardly stand up, and, making his way home, would, on entering his door, fall from exhaustion.”

The Church at Indianapolis.

Another writing to us says:

“I remember well the occasion of his advent here (from Lawrenceburg). Almost immediately his ministry attracted a 183strong following—quite too numerous and influential for the limited seating capacity of one hundred and fifty the chapel could accommodate, and a church was erected for him on the corner of Market and Circle Streets. That was probably in 1840. The building was regarded as a colossal edifice, and, while what would now be considered primitive in the extreme, was in the main comfortable and inviting. It was the first departure from the orthodox style of high pulpits, and contained a low desk and platform. From the first his preaching and precept were of the beauty of holiness and praise, gladness and thanksgiving, and to this end he added the attraction of music to the service of lesson and prayer. In those days his choir was considered magnificent, and what the organ might lack in volume was more than made up in melody and soul-reaching timbre. He was especially happy in the selection of music that seemed to be an accompaniment to his discourse. He was also the first clergyman, out of the Episcopal Church, to introduce chants in the service.

“Upon the opposite side of The Circle from his church, facing west, was located the First Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Phineas D. Gurley, pastor. I have often heard them spoken of as the ‘two distinguished divines’ who were ‘the wheel-horses among theologians.’ They were both leaders. I think that if there was one impression more than another conveyed by Mr. Beecher’s appearance it was that of reserve force. The steam up, he was capable and eager for the work in hand. Indeed, he seemed the very personification of energy. I recall, however, that he was always neatly dressed, usually in black, and that he was the first clergyman in this part of the country to wear a soft hat. I am not sure if he did not wear the first straw hat in those days of clerical conventionality. He was certainly devoted to comfort, if in no manner given to taking his ease. I doubt if he knew what it was to be idle. When apparently indulging in recreation his active mind was storing food for thought and spiritual teaching. The lightest romance which caught his fancy (for he was an omnivorous reader) furnished material for practical application.

“In form he was compactly built, with just enough flesh to give grace to his lithe and active movements. His step was particularly elastic and yet firm. All vigor and animation, there was the rosy tint of health in his complexion, and his eyes were 184as clear and bright as a child’s. His disposition was sunny, and the kindly grasp of his hand confirmed the charm of his genial presence. It followed that he was fond of young people and frequently participated in their romps and sports. I remember in a game of copenhagen at a church picnic he was in no way disconcerted by being rolled over and over down the hill when entangled in the rope.

“When need be he could be determined enough. At one time a younger brother was an inmate of his family, and was a classmate of mine at the University. In the boy’s judgment ‘all work and no play made Jack a dull boy,’ and he went fishing and was gone two days. Instead of whetting his appetite for study the diversion had the opposite effect, and he openly declared he would go to school no more. Mr. Beecher did not waste words on the matter, but seized him and took him by main force. As they drew near the University the lad broke loose and took to his heels, Mr. Beecher after him. The mud in our streets at that day was something phenomenal, and there was a tussle in it, when the two closed, that sent the ‘soft impeachment’ in every direction. For a little while the air was filled with mud; arms and legs were scarcely distinguishable. The authority of elder brother prevailed, carrying its point—and the younger brother, too—and handed him over to the tender mercies of the principal, Mr. Kemper, who was a rigid disciplinarian, and proverbial for observing the Scriptural injunction of not sparing the rod. The youth was equal to the occasion, however. Equipped in extra thickness of clothing, he took his punishment with most astonishing fortitude, much to the admiration of the other boys, whose sympathies were naturally enlisted.

“This incident illustrated Mr. Beecher’s indifference to appearances where a duty was involved. He also assisted in building, painting, and varnishing his house, and, if material fell short or heavy groceries were needed, did not hesitate to go after them with his wheelbarrow and take them home. In the single particular of giving dignity to labor, if there had been no other, his influence in the community was invaluable.

“As in a notice of his personnel his characteristics first attract attention, so in his ministerial labors his method of conversion came before the inculcation of doctrine.

“I have spoken of his fondness for young men. It was reciprocated 185to a degree amounting to championship. His influence was personal and direct. In his revival work he did not trust entirely to church service. He became personally acquainted with people. He had a habit of taking long strolls with men, and what his precept failed in his good companionship made up. One long walk generally captured the sinner.

“He did not confine himself to Bible preachments. I heard his lectures to young men in the basement of the church, and they were so practical that they reached every mind. He struck yeoman blows at the evils of intemperance, and engaged in a controversy with an influential distiller of Lawrenceburg that attracted much attention and was reported by the press of that date. Largely owing to the sentiment aroused by the debate, no doubt, the distiller abandoned his calling.

“He also engaged in the publication of an agricultural paper, the Indiana Farmer, and, as far as known, was the only professional man who ever put practical sense into a periodical of the sort. A keen lover of nature, he may be said to have put his heart in the work and made it a memorable success.

“I do not remember his making any political speeches, although it is well known that his church was the favorite resort of statesmen, who made a study of his oratory and diction for their own benefit. I know that he was deeply interested in all charitable enterprises, particularly the benevolent institutions that are now the pride of the State.

“Nor am I aware that he ever addressed the legislative bodies in particular, although the General Assembly men attended his church almost in a body. He was known as a Whig, but was not pronounced in that direction.

“The heart-felt interest he took in the slavery question was well known. About the year 1842 a roving commission of Abolitionists from the East visited Indianapolis. They held a meeting on the State House grounds, and I remember seeing Mr. Beecher a prominent figure on the platform.

“The unpopularity of the Abolition cause at that time cannot easily be imagined. To be identified with it was to be socially ostracized and boycotted generally. It required the courage of a martyr to be an Abolitionist. As notable examples may be cited two physicians who were members of Mr. Beecher’s church. Bold enough to avow their principles, they were exceedingly unpopular 186with the masses, and in their struggle to combat popular opinion found it extremely difficult to support themselves and families. They literally had no practice. The manner in which Mr. Beecher sustained himself on this question was prophetic of the personal hold he had upon men. It was exceptional.

“Meanwhile his popularity both as a preacher and man continued to increase. Indeed, his success was without precedent and has never been rivalled since. His church was crowded every Sabbath, both by his own congregation and visitors from other and distant churches. Although the pew system obtained, at least one-fourth of the seats (one entire section) was reserved for young men and strangers. Among them may be named the judges of the Supreme, Federal, and local courts; distinguished professional men; and if there was a Hugh Miller of a fellow, picking out truths of humanity from stone or devoting himself like the Owens to his fellow-man, he would be found in that imposing body of men. I suppose Indianapolis could not then boast of more than five thousand inhabitants, but there was an unusual aggregate of culture and refinement, and it was pretty sure to find delight in Mr. Beecher’s preaching and service.

“As a rule his morning sermons were more doctrinal and more confined to notes than his evening discourse. In the delivery of all of his sermons, however, he would at times become very much enthused and dramatic.

“One frequent gesture that I noticed in attending his last lecture here he retained through life. It was the habit of raising his right hand high in air, and after a pause, sometimes prolonged, bringing his arm down sharply to his side. An amusing incident once occurred in consequence. At the identical moment that his hand was raised a big, burly fellow, a member of his congregation, aroused from a nap (even his eloquence could not keep every man awake) and seeing the hand uplifted, the sleepy lout thought the benediction was being pronounced. He gathered himself up accordingly and marched toward the door, making a terrible racket with his squeaking boots, to the visible annoyance of the congregation. There was a charming twinkle of fun in the preacher’s eye as he gravely said: ‘If others of the congregation desire to leave I will wait.’ A laugh went round the audience.

“In his liberal interpretation of the divine calling of bringing 187sinners to repentance, some motley members, not to say black sheep, were gathered into the fold. Among these was a lame tailor who was a very hard case indeed, but was possessed of an appreciative soul and a wonderfully retentive memory. He was always to be found in his seat in church and was attentive enough to inspire a speaker. The following morning the tailor’s shop would be crowded to hear him repeat the sermon, or eloquent passages thereof. This he would do, word for word, and with a close imitation of voice and gesture that proved a first-class actor had been lost to the world in the realm of ‘the shears’ and ‘goose.’ A propensity for gambling that could not be checked was reported to the church and he was dropped from the roll.

“Take them all in all, Mr. Beecher’s sermons in Indianapolis were marvels of logic and learning, graced by rare beauty of expression and that feeling to nature kin which touched the heart. His usefulness could not be circumscribed by the then narrow limits. His fame spread abroad in the land, and one fine Sunday two or more strangers, with an unmistakable New York air, appeared in the church. It transpired that they were a visiting committee in search of a bright and shining pulpit light, and it all ended in his call to Brooklyn.

“Great were the regrets of his congregation and the community of which he was the great central figure of interest and influence. The impress he left has not been obliterated, with the growth of the city, by the lapse of time. In many respects the city is a monument to his earnest efforts to promote her moral and intellectual development.”

Mr. Beecher has often remarked in later years that his first real preaching was at Indianapolis. Although at Lawrenceburg he was noted for his brilliancy of diction and wonderful oratorical power, and by his good-fellowship and the strong personal interest which he took in all his people made many and lasting friends, yet he did not feel that he was doing real, effective work. “I can preach so as to make the people come to hear me,” said he to good old Bishop Little, “but somehow I can’t preach them clear into the kingdom.”

A year or two after his removal to Indianapolis he determined to find out what the difficulty was.

“We had delivered hundreds before, but until then the sermon 188was the end and not the means. We had a vague idea that truth was to be preached, and then it was to be left to do its work under God’s blessing as best it might. The result was not satisfying. Why should not preaching do now what it did in the Apostles’ days? Why should it be a random and unrequited effort? These thoughts grew, and the want of fruits was so painful that we determined to make a careful examination of the Apostles’ teaching, to see what made it so immediately efficient. We found that they laid a foundation first of historical truth common to them and their auditors; that this mass of familiar truth was then concentrated upon the hearers in the form of an intense personal application and appeal; that the language was not philosophical and scholastic, but the language of common life. We determined to try the same. We considered what moral truths were admitted by everybody and gathered many of them together. We considered how they could be so combined as to press men toward a religious state. We recalled to mind the character and condition of many, who, we knew, would be present, and then, after as earnest a prayer as we ever offered, and with trembling solicitude, we went to the academy and preached the new sermon. The Lord gave it power, and ten or twelve persons were aroused by it and led ultimately to a religious life.

“This was the most memorable day of our ministerial life. The idea was born. Preaching was a definite and practical thing. Our people needed certain moral changes. Preaching was only a method of enforcing truths, not for the sake of the truths themselves, but for the results to be sought in men. Man was the thing. Henceforth our business was to work upon man; to study him, to stimulate and educate him. A sermon was good that had power on the heart, and was good for nothing, no matter how good, that had no moral power on man. Others had learned this. It was the secret of success in every man who ever was eminent for usefulness in preaching. But no man can inherit experience. It must be born in each man for himself. After the light dawned I could then see how plainly Jonathan Edwards’s sermons were so made. Those gigantic applications of his were only the stretching out of the arms of the sermon upon the lives and hearts of his audience. I could see it now, and wondered that I had not seen it before.”

189The application of this, to him, new idea soon began to be apparent in rich results.

A series of revivals sprang up, by which many were brought into the church. From one of his successors we learn that “these were great foundation days for the church. Strong religious impressions were made upon the young town, and very many were redeemed to a life of Christian service. These were fruitful years, starred over by three prolific revivals. In the spring of 1842 nearly one hundred were received; again, in 1843, was another spiritual blessing, and once more in 1845. Such fruits vindicate the character and fervor of the pastoral activity. Many of these converts are in the church to-day, old men, testifying as elders and devout believers to the genuineness of this work. Mr. Beecher preached seventy nights in succession during one spring, in labors abundant. He ceased special effort, he said, to permit many who did not wish to come out under an excitement, to calmly join the church.

“Revivals have been characteristic of this church from the beginning. They have brought it steady and growing and efficient workers.”

He wrote to his father May 1, 1842:

“Prosperity and peace dwell with us. Our church is filled; our young converts run well, and already there is gathered in material for another revival of persons hitherto not wont to attend church anywhere.

“I hope this fall and early winter to see the scenes of this spring renewed. The neighborhoods about town are also revived.”

He has told us of one occasion when he attended a meeting of the Presbytery with his father. Great efforts were made at these meetings to awaken a religious interest among the people especially in the church where the meetings were held. Several sermons had been delivered on this occasion, with no great effect, when he was called upon to preach. He selected for his subject “The Parable of the Prodigal Son.” “As I went on describing the going away of the sinner from God the people became interested; as I described the sinner’s coming to himself the interest increased; but when I came to the return of the sinner to God, and God’s readiness, even hastening, to receive him, the whole audience broke down, and father, who was on the platform with 190me, said, wiping his eyes and spectacles, ‘Thank the Lord! a revival is begun.’ Mr. C———, a good brother, grasped my hand after the sermon with great fervor. ‘You did well, Beecher, you did well; but you ought to have given ’em salt instead of sugar.’ But since the salt had been tried several days without effect, and the sugar, as he called my preaching, brought many to Christ, I did not agree with him.”

His zealous labors were by no means confined to Indianapolis.Indianapolis. He was constantly called to help in the towns and villages throughout the centre of the State. One, two, and even three weeks at a time he would be gone, laboring to help some brother striving to awaken his people.

Terre Haute, Madison, Greenwood, Greencastle, Lafayette, Logansport, Fort Wayne, Laporte, and Columbus are the names we find most frequently endorsed on the manuscript notes of his old revival sermons now before us. These were the days he loved to look back upon; though full of hardship, privations, and not a little suffering, they were also full of that great joy which comes to those who labor successfully in winning souls.

Revisiting Terre Haute in one of his lecture tours many years afterward, and for the first time after coming East, he writes back:

“And now my face is turned homeward! I am bound to Terre Haute—clear across the prairie that I once traversed in early days. Farm touches farm over these wide expanses which, forty years ago, I thought could never be inhabited! No coal, no timber—how, except along the streams, could men settle and thrive? Railroads, those dry and solid rivers, have solved the problem.

“Is this Terre Haute? How has thy prosperity increased and thy beauty diminished!

“I wandered up and down the streets to find my Terre Haute! It was gone, covered up, lost, utterly lost, in new streets, new buildings! Where is the former green? Where the quiet fields within bowshot of the town?

“At any rate, I shall know the church. There it was that I first wrought in revivals, and every board and nail in it was precious. I found it. I entered by the basement side-door and stood in the lecture-room where I preached my first sermon, the same day of my arrival in town, to aid Rev. Dr. Jewett. It was 191a solemn feeling that stole over me. I saw the audience again. The seats were filled with shadowy listeners! It only needed to see a few of the familiar faces—L. H. Scott, Dr. Ketcham, Ball, Gookin, and others—to make it real again! Just then came up the aisle Harry Ross himself! It was the touch needed to round out the reminiscence. Only one fact disturbed the sweet illusion. This was not the same church. The old one had been burned, and this one took its place! It was a gentle shock to my sensibilities. But it stood on the very ground, and was on the old foundations, and upon the same plan, and looked like the old one, and so I inwardly voted that it was the old one and took my comfort of it! The city is wonderfully improved in every way except to those sentimentalists who come hither to renew the past and live over again old experiences.

“After the lecture, in a special train, we sped, through darkness and storm, to Indianapolis—three hours’ blessed ride. How different this midnight ride from the first one, thirty-five years before! For three weeks I had labored side by side with Brother Jewett—the first revival in which I had ever taken part! How helpless and wretched did I feel when Jewett sent for me—then newly settled in Indianapolis—to come over and help him! I had no effective sermons. I did not know how to preach in a revival. Yet my elders said, Go. I rode two days the lonely road, through beech forests (now all gone), in a dazed and wondering state. Hardly was my saddle empty before Jewett was at my elbow. ‘You have done well to come. You must preach to-night.’ In a moment the cloud lifted. The reluctance was gone. It has been so all my life. At a distance I dread and brood and shrink from any weighty enterprise; but the moment the occasion arrives joy shines clear, and an eager appetite to dash into the battle comes.

“Three memorable weeks at a time when events stamp the memory and the heart as the die stamps the coin! When the time came to return home did ever heart swell with stronger and more unutterable feeling? To go back to the ordinary round of church life from this glowing centre seemed so intolerable that my whole nature and all my soul rose up in uncontrollable prayer. Through the beech woods, sometimes crying, sometimes singing, and always praying, I rode in one long controversy with God. ‘Slay me if Thou wilt, but do not send me home to barrenness. 192Thou shalt go with me. I will not be refused. I am not afraid of Thee! I will prevail or die!’—these and even wilder strains went through the soul.

“At length the clouds rolled away. The heavens had never seemed so beautiful and radiant. An unspeakable peace and confidence filled my soul. The assurance of victory was perfect, and tranquillity blossomed into joy at every step. The first day was one long struggle of prayer. The second day was one long ecstasy of joy and thanksgiving! I need not say to the wise that the fire of my heart kindled in the church, and for months the genial warmth brought forth a spiritual summer, so that flowers and fruit abounded in the garden of the Lord.

“And now in this three-hour midnight ride, amid outward storms but inward joy and thanksgiving, I recalled the old days, and mingled their light with the gladness of the passing hour.”

Referring to a revival at Terre Haute—perhaps the one just mentioned—Dr. Lyman Beecher wrote:

“The revival here under Henry’s administration and preaching was, in the adaptation of means and happy results, one of the most perfectly conducted and delightful that I have ever known.”

We can get some slight idea of the hard physical labor he endured in his ordinary home preaching by quoting a single page of his “Sermon Record Book”—a not unusual record:

At this time he undertook a minute and careful analysis of the Gospels:

“I took the New Testament, I read it diligently, I made myself 193familiar with the life and teachings of Christ, I became saturated with the spirit of the four Gospels, I obtained all the helps I could get for their interpretation, and I have now in my drawer a heap of manuscripts in which I have condensed and compiled these Gospels, everything in them being conveniently arranged for use. It was an immense work. These four Gospels had, as it were, been eaten and digested by me and gone into my blood and bones.

“It was while I was engaged in this work that Christ was brought to my soul for the first time in my life with a sweetness and beauty, with a vividness and glory, that for the time transformed the heavens and the earth to my eyes. I had a conception of the depths of the nature of the Divine Being that made metaphysical doctrines and philosophical formulas more repugnant to me than they had ever been before, and I entered into a vow and covenant that if I were permitted to preach I would know nothing but Christ and Him crucified among His people. I took my horse and saddle-bags and traversed the wilderness of Indiana, keeping that view in my mind. For eight or ten years I labored for the poor and needy, in cabins, in camp-meetings, through woods, up and down, sometimes riding two days to meet my appointments. I had no books but my Bible, and I went from one to the other—from the Bible to men, and from men to the Bible. When a case came up I said to myself: ‘What will reach that case?’ and I looked through the Acts of the Apostles to see how they reached such cases. I hunted the Bible through in order to get at the right way. So I worked on, and at last the habit was formed in my mind of studying men, their dispositions, their wants, their peculiarities; and then I worked with reference to curing them, not constructing a system, but striving to produce righteousness in the individual and in communities.”

It is said that in his preaching he often went double-loaded. He would go to church with a sermon specially prepared for some person whom he greatly desired to reach. If, however, he was not present, he would preach a more general sermon. But when, on some other occasion, he found, on entering church, that the object of his solicitude was present, he would lay aside the sermon prepared for that day and preach the special one.

It often occasioned no little surprise in the mind of the subject 194that Mr. Beecher should have happened that day to preach a sermon so exactly fitted to his case.

Although he had the strongest feelings of love and kindliness toward mankind, both in the abstract and the concrete, yet he never hesitated to lash with stinging words any who took advantage of their strength to abuse another’s weakness. And in such a case nothing could induce him to back down or withdraw from the attack, unless he could be satisfied that he had been mistaken in his facts.

One noticeable incident of the kind occurred during his ministry in Indianapolis, as narrated by Mrs. Beecher:

A man in the city hotel, and not a little feared because of his brutality, had done something more brutal than usual, and, the facts coming to Mr. Beecher’s knowledge, in his sermon on the following Sunday he expressed in no gentle terms his abhorrence of the act, and in very strong language rebuked the man.

Many of his listeners were alarmed lest the man would, when he heard of the sermon, do Mr. Beecher some injury.

Of course before the day was over the substance in the sermon had been reported throughout the town, and did not fail to reach the man’s ears.

Monday morning Mr. Beecher went to the post-office immediately after breakfast, and must go right by the hotel around which this man would most likely be hanging. He got his mail and turned to come home. As he passed the hotel there were several standing by, evidently watching for some development. At that moment the man came down the steps with a pistol in his hand.

“Did you say thus and so in your sermon yesterday?”

“I did.”

“Did you intend those remarks for me, or were you meaning me?”

“I most certainly did.”

“Then take it back right here, or by ——— I’ll shoot you on the spot.”

“Shoot away,” was the reply, as, looking the ruffian sternly in the face, Mr. Beecher calmly, with deliberate step, walked past the man. With pointed pistol and fierce oaths the man followed for a few paces, when, baffled by the imperturbable coolness of his opponent, he slunk away down a side-street, ashamed to return to the hotel.

195Mr. Beecher himself has given us an account of another similar event:

“I remember that in Indianapolis there was a meeting called for the enforcement of the laws against gamblers and against grog-selling, at which I was requested to address mechanics and laborers; and some of these violators of the law were there. A man named Bishop, and others of that stamp, were in the meeting to hear what was going to be said. They were the very men that we were aiming at. I was much excited. There were gambling-dens and liquor-saloons where young men were induced to drink and form bad habits, and were in danger of being dragged down to destruction; and I expressed myself plainly, and pointed to Bishop, who sat on a back seat, and denounced him to his face. There was a lively time, if I recollect right; and he gave out the next day that when he and I met one or the other of us was going to be whipped. I went down the street soon after, and I had forgotten all about it until I was right in front of his shop. He was a bully. He watched me as I came down, and I confess that my first thought was a wish that I was not there; but then it would never do for me to flinch, and I walked as though I did not see him till I came close to him, when I turned and looked at him. He thought I was going to attack him, and waited a moment; I bowed and said, ‘Good-morning, Mr. Bishop,’ and passed on. He would not run after me and hit me, and so the affair blew over.

“A year or two after that I left Indianapolis and went up the river, and he chanced to be on the boat with me; and there never was a man that paid me more kind attention than he did. He looked after my children here and there, guarded me at night, and wanted me to drink with him—some soda-water. He opened his whole heart to me, and told me how he felt at the time of my remarks, how he felt the next day, and how he had come to feel since. He said he knew he was carrying on a wicked trade, that he was mad with himself, and that he was mad with me, and told me what it was that induced him to stop. I found that under his love of gain, which had led him to sell liquor, there was a conscience, a heart, and a good deal of kindness.”

During the latter part of his ministry in Indianapolis the Presbyterian clergymen had been requested by the presbytery to 196preach at least one sermon during the year on slavery. Agreeably to this suggestion Mr. Beecher prepared three sermons on this subject. He waited until the United States Federal Court came there, with Judge McLean as the presiding judge; and when all of the State courts, Supreme Court and Circuit, were in session and the Legislature was convened—so that all lawyers and public officers, men of every kind, thronged the city—he announced that he should preach on slavery.

From the original manuscript before us we learn that he presented his subject in three sermons. In the first he discussed ancient slavery, especially among the Hebrews, its origin, methods, and final abandonment. In his second he presented “the doctrine and practice of the New Testament in respect to slavery.”

In his last he discussed the moral aspects of slavery and its effect upon the community. These sermons made a profound impression on the public mind. Indiana was just over the border of slaveland, and many of its people sympathized heartily with the slave-holders. The prevailing sentiment was very bitter against the Abolitionists. There was very little patience with such “cranks” and “fanatics.” So when Mr. Beecher attacked slavery with the same unsparing earnestness which characterized his utterances on this subject in latter days—for he did not hesitate to denounce it as a crime against God and man—he stirred up a very large and very energetic hornet’s nest. The city was all excitement. Men talked of nothing else. The friends of slavery were bitter and threatening; the few friends of freedom, overawed by the threatening demonstrations, held their peace and waited to see the outcome. Mr. Beecher stood almost alone. Many of the church-brethren were shocked and grieved beyond all expression; some even felt so outraged as to send for letters of dismissal. Many prophesied that he had destroyed himself and ended his influence for usefulness for ever, mourning over his speedy downfall—a mournful prophecy so often repeated in after-years by timid brothers whenever he took any advanced position, and with the same results as in this instance.

Holding the United States Circuit, then in session, was Judge McLean, of the United States Supreme Court, whose views upon all public questions were naturally held in high esteem. The hotel where he was stopping was full of lawyers and members of 197the Legislature. On the Monday morning after these sermons, in angry and excited groups, they stood in the public rooms of the hotel, talking about the three sermons which had thrown the town into such a ferment. The judge, happening to join one of these groups, was asked his opinion. Instead of denouncing Mr. Beecher’s bold stand as madness, he calmly but with decisive emphasis replied: “Well, I think if every minister in the United States would be as faithful it would be a great advance in settling this question.” The judge’s words spread as rapidly as had the sermons. They checked the flow of bitter criticism. Men stopped talking and began to think; before the day was out a revulsion of feeling set in. Many of the most hostile found their anger changing into admiration—not convinced by Mr. Beecher’s logic, but deeply impressed by his pluck. Those who shared his views felt emboldened to speak out; and that middle class, the social weather-vanes who like to go with the majority, soon felt the changing breeze and began veering around to his side. The timid church-members took heart, the applications for letters of dismissal were recalled. The tide that threatened to overwhelm the plucky preacher only lifted him up and carried him the higher in public estimation. This was the first demonstration of his ability to face and overcome an adverse public sentiment while championing a just but unpopular cause—an experience many times repeated in the forty years that followed. Sometimes it seemed as if he could not stand against the flood poured out upon him. Then the consciousness of right made him strong and gave him that great peace that no whirlwind of adversity could destroy, and roused up in him a determination to only work the harder.

It was while in Indianapolis that he began his first real literary work. It is true that he did some editorial work while at Lane Seminary, but that was too short-lived and occasional to be regarded as regular literary occupation.

Here at Indianapolis he accepted the editorial chair of the Indiana Farmer and Gardener, and, as we are assured by those who were readers of that journal, threw around the subjects therein discussed a brightness of humor and fancy that made the otherwise dry topics of fodder, fertilizers, and plantings seem new and interesting subjects.

“It may be of some service to the young, as showing how 198valuable the fragments of time may become, if mention is made of the way in which we became prepared to edit this journal.

“The continued taxation of daily preaching, extending through months, and once through eighteen consecutive months without the exception of a single day, began to wear upon the nerves, and made it necessary for us to seek some relaxation. Accordingly we used, after each week-night’s preaching, to drive the sermon out of our heads by some alterative reading.

“In the State Library were Loudon’s works—his encyclopædias of Horticulture, of Agriculture, and of Architecture. We fell upon them, and for years almost monopolized them.

“In our little one-story cottage, after the day’s work was done, we pored over these monuments of an almost incredible industry, and read, we suppose, not only every line but much of it many times over; until at length we had a topographical knowledge of many of the fine English estates quite as intimate, we dare say, as was possessed by many of their truant owners. There was something exceedingly pleasant, and is yet, in the studying over mere catalogues of flowers, trees, fruits, etc.

“A seedsman’s list, a nurseryman’s catalogue, are more fascinating to us than any story. In this way, through several years, we gradually accumulated materials and became familiar with facts and principles, which paved the way for our editorial labors. Lindley’s ‘Horticulture’ and Gray’s ‘Structural Botany’ came in as constant companions. And when, at length, through a friend’s liberality, we became the recipients of the London Gardener’s Chronicle, edited by Prof. Lindley, our treasures were inestimable. Many hundred times have we lain awake for hours unable to throw off the excitement of preaching, and beguiling the time with imaginary visits to the Chiswick Garden, to the more than oriental magnificence of the Duke of Devonshire’s grounds at Chatsworth. We have had long discussions in that little bed-room at Indianapolis, with Van Mons about pears, with Vibert about roses, with Thompson and Knight of fruits and theories of vegetable life, and with Loudon about everything under the heavens in the horticultural world.

“This employment of waste hours not only answered a purpose of soothing excited nerves then, but brought us into such relations to the material world that we speak with entire moderation when we say that all the estates of the richest duke in England 199could not have given us half the pleasure which we have derived from pastures, waysides, and unoccupied prairies.”

He was an earnest advocate of manual labor. He had no patience with those whose squeamish effeminacy made them look upon labor as degrading.

On the fly-leaves of his “Editorial Agricultural Book,” begun January 10, 1845, he wrote:

“It is my deliberate conviction that physical labor is indispensable to intellectual and moral health, that the industrial and producing interests of society are powerfully conservative of morals. Especially do I regard the tillage of the soil as conducive to life, health, morals, and manhood. I sympathize with the advance of society through practical physical labors more than I do through metaphysical speculations. I obtain clearer views of religious truth through my sympathies with men and their life than I do through books and their thoughts. Nor do I think any theology will be sound which is made in the closet. It should be made in the street, shop, ship, office, and on the farm. I have followed both inclination and conviction in allying myself to the laboring classes.”

His knowledge on the subject of farming was not altogether theoretic. One of his old parishioners writes us:

“He loved to work and toil, especially in his own garden. He always had the earliest vegetables in the market, and his garden was better than any other in the city. He loved to work among his flowers, and could call every flower by its name readily. I think that he loved his flowers and took more pleasure with them than anything else, excepting his family. He certainly was more devoted to his family than any man I ever saw.”

It was no uncommon thing for him to take his vegetables to the market before daylight, sometimes, as an especial favor, taking his little five-year-old girl with him.

From the report of the fall exhibition of the Indiana Horticultural Society we learn that Mr. Beecher took the three first prizes for the best exhibition of squashes, beets, and oyster-plants. His beets, it is stated, weighed from eight to fourteen pounds.

The literary production which first attracted any general attention was his “Lectures to Young Men.” The State capital seemed to be the headquarters for all those forms of temptation and vice which are particularly liable to undermine the 200morals of the young. Many a young man, whose future seemed bright with the promise of an honorable and useful life, had Mr. Beecher seen swept from his feet and whirled away to a dishonorable end—young men who might have been saved had some one been able to show them the dangers of the paths they were treading, whose beginnings seemed so pleasant and fair. Greatly distressed at what he saw, he finally determined to deliver a series of lectures intended primarily for young men, and for the purpose of opening their eyes. These were subsequently revised and published, under the title of “Lectures to Young Men.” The purpose of these lectures he aptly indicated in his preface:

“When a son is sent abroad to begin life for himself, what gift would any parent consider excessive to him who should sit down by his side and open the several dangers of his career, so that the young man should, upon meeting the innumerable covert forms of vice, be able to penetrate their disguises, and to experience, even for the most brilliant seductions, a hearty and intelligent disgust?

“Having watched the courses of those who seduce the young—their arts, their blandishments, their pretences—having witnessed the beginning and consummation of ruin, almost in the same year, of many young men, naturally well disposed, whose downfall began with the appearances of innocence, I felt an earnest desire, if I could, to raise the suspicion of the young and to direct their reason to the arts by which they are with such facility destroyed.

“I ask every YOUNG MAN who may read this book not to submit his judgment to mine, not to hate because I denounce, nor blindly to follow me, but to weigh my reason, that he may form his own judgment. I only claim the place of a companion; and, that I may gain his ear, I have sought to present truth in those forms which best please the young; and though I am not without hope of satisfying the aged and the wise, my whole thought has been to carry with me the intelligent sympathy of young men.”

He dedicated the book to his father—

To you I owe more than to any other living being. In childhood you were my Parent, in later life my Teacher, in manhood my 201Companion. To your affectionate vigilance I owe my principles, my knowledge, and that I am a minister of the Gospel of Christ. For whatever profit they derive from this Book the young will be indebted to you.”

Our space forbids any attempt at reproducing or analyzing these lectures.

The evils that he attacked were real, and he did not mince matters in the assault. In the course of his lectures some of his good people, including one or two of the elders, thought that he was too plain and outspoken in his description of the temptations and dangers that beset the young, and undertook to advise him, suggesting that he should be more prudent in the forms of his expressions. He expressed regret that he should differ with them, but he proposed, he said, to treat the subject as he thought he ought, without regard to any instructions given. He did not propose to fight a mad dog with a handful of straw. Notwithstanding the timidity of his advisers, it appears, from the universal testimony of those who heard them, that they did great good, awakening the community to the dangers he exposed.

He was earnestly urged to revise and print them, “that their usefulness may be extended beyond the place of their delivery.”

His first attempts at their revision were not at all satisfactory to him, for he said afterwards:

“I remember, when I was reading over my lectures to young men, with the intention of printing them, that I took down a volume of Dr. Barrow’s sermons and read two on the subject of ‘Industry and Idleness.’ I had two lectures on similar subjects that I thought of publishing, but they seemed to me so mean in the comparison that I took up the manuscript and fired it across the room and under the book-case, where it lay I do not know how long, and said: ‘I am not going to put those lectures into print and make an ass of myself.’ I thought that I would be a fool to think there was anything in them worth publishing. Afterwards, however, a volume of lectures to young men was lent to me, and when I read them they seemed so thin and weak that I said: ‘If these are acceptable to the public and will do good I think I can print mine.’”

The many editions published in this country and England justified his final conclusion.

Although his salary had been doubled on coming to Indianapolis, 202had he received it all it would hardly have kept pace with his necessities. Many little necessities incident to their new surroundings called for expense. In the State capital two rooms over a stable would hardly meet the requirements of his social surroundings. It became necessary to hire an entire house, the spare rooms of which were devoted to boarders whose rent helped out the slender family purse. The house needed painting; why hire a painter? He could do it himself. Was he not born and brought up in sturdy old New England, where every lad was expected, almost from the day he was weaned, to take care of himself and add his labor to increase the common good; where a man was thought wanting in ordinary “cuteness” who could not turn his hand to any job and do anything he had seen another do?

Off he starts to the paint-store with his old horse and wagon, entering so enthusiastically upon the work in hand that he wholly forgot an engagement, made for that morning, to marry a couple. As the paints were being put up, he suddenly recalls his engagement, abruptly turns on his heel, rushes from the store, jumps into his wagon, and goes clattering down the street, leaving the astounded storekeeper in anxious solicitude for his sanity. Returning shortly, with a merry laugh he explained the cause of his precipitate outgoing. He found the couple waiting, married them, and then returned for his paint. Getting his supplies, he goes to work. He said:

“I wanted to economize in every way I could, and meant to paint the house myself; and I did. I got along well enough until I came to the gable end, which was two and a half stories high. When I began to paint there I was so afraid that I should fall off from the platform that I nearly rubbed out with my vest what I put on with the brush, but in the course of a week I got so used to climbing that I was as nimble as any painter in town.”

Here three more little ones came to swell the family circle, adding new joys to the heart of one who loved almost with a mother’s devotion every little child he saw. But these joys brought three more mouths to feed, three more little bodies to clothe.

Fortunately food was abundant and very cheap. In the fall and early winter game abounded, so that pigeon, quail, and ducks were bought for almost nothing, and at times were literally given away.

Mr. Beecher’s House at Indianapolis.

203We remember the story oft told by him of the man bringing six dozen pigeons to town. He tried to sell them, and was laughed at. He then offered to give them away; no one wanted them. “Well,” he said, “I won’t take them home; perhaps if I leave them in my wagon in the street some one will steal them.” Returning a half-hour later, he found that some other hunter equally anxious to get rid of his game had dumped eight dozen more into his wagon.

His people would sometimes donate food or clothing. The best suit of clothes he owned was made over from a discarded suit donated by one of his parishioners.

Yet these were among the happiest years of his life.

For he found joy in his work. He loved his people and was beloved. Above all, his teaching was bearing rich harvest, and many, many souls found rest and peace through his words. His success was very gratifying, and urged him on to greater effort.

Among the young his influence was especially marked. A genial playfellow and companion, entering with hearty zest into all their sports, helping them out of their little difficulties, he gained their confidence and love. He guided the feet of many into the paths of a higher and nobler life.

One of these friends writes:

“He had a class of young girls, and I do not think that any one that recited to him could ever forget his original way of teaching. There were eight in the class, and we enjoyed the hour spent with him. He developed our originality. He first attracted us toward Milton. We studied, for he inspired in us the desire to know. In after-years, in his visits to Indianapolis, the surviving scholars were looked up and called upon, and the children of those who were gone were asked after. With some of these scholars he was thrown more intimately than with others, for all were not in his church. In these he naturally took much interest and directed them in their reading. I remember his telling me to ‘let Bulwer alone and the French novels,’ which were then first being translated. At a company, a church social, or the singing-school he had a merry word to say to one and another. All felt at home with him.

“My brother tells this story: When he was nine years old he had with great labor made a kite, at least what he thought would serve as one. In those days there were no toy-shops here, 204and, indeed, it was with difficulty material could be found out of which to manufacture a kite. But, as I said, he and his little sister had succeeded in shaping a thing which they called a kite. So, on a spring day, they set forth to fly it. My brother held the string and the little sister kept the kite off the ground. He ran, and she after him; but run as they would, coax as they might, their efforts availed nothing. Finally, disappointed, footsore, and covered with dust, they stopped to take breath. While thus brooding over their failure they saw Mr. Beecher standing near, looking down upon them with an amused but sympathetic expression on his face. ‘What do you call that?’ ‘A kite,’ was the melancholy response. ‘Well! well!’ the kind heart fully taking in the situation. ‘Come to my house to-morrow afternoon.’ There was hope in the tone, and the boy’s heart bounded. The next day he went to Mr. Beecher’s. He was shown a kite bigger than himself. He could scarcely believe his senses. Why, the tail even was long enough to set him wild. ‘Where’s your string?’ asked Mr. Beecher. Out of his well-worn pocket, where all a boy’s treasures are hidden, he drew forth a cotton string neither long nor strong. ‘This will not do; have you any money?’ ‘No, sir.’ ‘Come, let’s go and get a string.’ To the nearest grocery-store, where in early times everything was kept, from pins up to ploughs, they went. A ball of twine was bought for a ‘bit’; one was not enough—two for a quarter. Out into the street they went, and the kite was a success. Away it flew over their heads, the heart of the happy boy flying with the kite far into the heavens, and won to his pastor for all time by this simple, kindly act.”

Like all mankind, he had to taste the bitter with the sweet and pass under the shadow of the dark cloud of sorrow.

First his brother George, who had been a kind of guardian brother to him, and deeply loved, was killed. The news came with the shock of a lightning-bolt.

“I was called to go to Jacksonville to deliver an address,” he said, speaking of his brother’s death. “The journey was a long one, across two States (or one and a half). I took my wife and child with me, and we were gone some two weeks. When, on returning, we had got within two miles of Indianapolis, and were as elated and songful and merry as one can imagine anybody to be, we met one of the elders of my church riding out from the city, 205and he said, after stopping to greet us: ‘Have you heard the news?’ ‘No,’ said I; ‘what is it?’ ‘Your brother George has killed himself.’ I did not say a word, my wife did not say a word, and he did not say one word more. We rode on, and as we rode I could not help thinking, ‘Killed himself! killed himself! killed himself!’ It was nearly an hour before we got home, and then I learned that my brother’s death was caused by an accident with a double-barrelled gun while he was shooting birds in the garden; and it was a great relief to me to know that ‘killed himself’ did not mean suicide.”

Later came the death of his little boy George, the first loss in his own immediate family. He wrote, a few years later, to his sister, Mrs. Stowe:

“I was in a missionary field, enduring hardships, and thinking in myself always how to stand up under any blow, even if it were a thunder-stroke, with Paul’s heroism at once firing me and putting me to shame. Our noble boy suddenly sickened. Our people did not know how to sympathize. Few came while he lived; fewer yet when, on a bleak March day, we bore him through the storm, and, standing in the snow, we laid his beautiful form in his cold, white grave. Eunice was heart-broken. My home was a fountain of anguish. It was not for me to quail or show shrinking. So I choked my grief and turned outwardly from myself to seek occupation.”

In later years this sorrow had hardly lost its acuteness:

“I remember, to-night, as well as I did at the time, the night that my eldest-born son died. That was my first great sorrow. I remember the battle of hope and of fear, and I remember the victory of submission. The child revived in the night. I went to Indianapolis (I lived on the edge of that city), and I shall never forget the amazing uplift of soul that I had, nor that one unspoken, universal thought of prayer, which seemed to me to fill the whole hemisphere, for the life of my child. I think that if one ever came near throwing his soul out of his body, I did. And yet before the morning dawned the child had found a brighter world. This was a double sorrow because I had given him up and then taken him back again. Then came the sudden wrench.

“It was in March, and there had just come up a great storm, and all the ground was covered with snow.

“We went down to the graveyard with little Georgie, and 206waded through it in the snow. I got out of the carriage, and took the little coffin in my arms, and walked knee-deep to the side of the grave, and looking in I saw the winter down at the very bottom of it. The coffin was lowered to its place, and I saw the snowflakes follow it and cover it, and then the earth hid it from the winter.

“If I should live a thousand years I could not help shivering every time I thought of it. It seemed to me then as though I had not only lost my child, but buried him in eternal snows. It was very hard for faith or imagination to break through the physical aspect of things and find a brighter feeling.”

The attachment which his people felt for him was more than reciprocated. He always loved to recall these early years and in memory live over again their joys and sorrows, their struggles and triumphs.

In the early winter of 1877, in the course of a Western lecture trip, revisiting Indianapolis, he wrote back:

“I went to Indianapolis in the fall of 1849 with a sick babe in my arms, who showed the first symptoms of recovery after eating blackberries which I gathered by the way. The city had then a population of four thousand. At no time during my residence did it outreach five thousand. Behold it to-day with one hundred and ten thousand inhabitants! The Great National Road, which at that time was of great importance, since sunk into forgetfulness, ran through the city and constituted the main street. With the exception of two or three streets there were no ways along which could not be seen the original stumps of the forest. I bumped against them in a buggy too often not to be assured of the fact.

“Here I preached my first real sermon; here, for the first time, I strove against death in behalf of a child, and was defeated; here I built a house and painted it with my own hands; here I had my first garden and became the bishop of flowers for this diocese; here I first joined the editorial fraternity and edited the Farmer and Gardener; here I had my first full taste of chills and fever; here for the first and last time I waded to church ankle-deep in mud and preached with pantaloons tucked into my boot-tops. All is changed now.

“In searching for my obscure little ten-foot cottage I got lost. So changed was everything that I groped over familiar territory 207like a blind man in a strange city. It is no longer my Indianapolis, with the aboriginal forest fringing the town, with pasture-fields lying right across from my house; without coal, without railroads, without a stone big enough to throw at a cat. It was a joyful day and a precious gift when Calvin Fletcher allowed me to take from the fragments of stone used to make foundations for the State Bank a piece large enough to put in my pork-barrel. I left Indianapolis for Brooklyn on the very day upon which the cars on the Madison Railroad for the first time entered the town; and I departed on the first train that ever left the place. On a wood-car, rigged up with boards across from side to side, went I forth.

“It is now a mighty city, full of foundries, manufactories, wholesale stores, a magnificent court-house, beautiful dwellings, noble churches, wide and fine streets, and railroads more than I can name radiating to every point of the compass.

“The old academy where I preached for a few months is gone, but the church into which the congregation soon entered still is standing on the Governor’s Circle. No one can look upon that building as I do. A father goes back to his first house, though it be but a cabin, where his children were born, with feelings which can never be transferred to any other place. As I looked long and yearningly upon that homely building the old time came back again. I stood in the crowded lecture-room as on the night when the current of religious feeling first was beginning to flow! Talk of a young mother’s feelings over her first babe—what is that compared with the solemnity, the enthusiasm, the impetuosity of gratitude, of humility, of singing gladness, with which a young pastor greets the incoming of his first revival? He stands upon the shore to see the tide come in! It is the movement of the infinite, ethereal tide! It is from the other world! There is no color like heart color. The homeliest things dipped in that for ever after glow with celestial hues. The hymns that we sang in sorrow or in joy and triumph in that humble basement have never lost a feather, but fly back and forth between the soul and heaven, plumed as never was any bird-of-paradise.

“I stood and looked at the homely old building, and saw a procession of forms going in and out that the outward eye will never see again—Judge Morris, Samuel Merril, Oliver H. Smith, 208D. V. Cully, John L. Ketcham, Coburn, Fletcher, Bates, Bullard, Munsel, Ackley, O’Neil, and many, many more! There have been hours when there was not a hand-breadth between us and the saintly host in the invisible church! In the heat and pressure of later years the memories of those early days have been laid aside, but not effaced. They rise as I stand, and move in a gentle procession before me. No outward history is comparable to the soul’s inward life; of the soul’s inward life no part is so sublime as its eminent religious developments. And the pastor, who walks with men, delivering them from thrall, aspersing their sorrow with tears, kindling his own heart as a torch to light the way for those who would see the invisible, has, of all men, the most transcendent heart-histories. I have seen much of life since I trod that threshold for the last time; but nothing has dimmed my love, nor has any later or riper experience taken away the bloom and sanctity of my early love. And I can truly say of hundreds: ‘For though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the Gospel.’

“But other incidents arise—the days of sickness, chills and fever, the gardening days, my first editorial experience, my luck in horses and pigs, my house-building; and not a few scrapes—being stalled in mud, half-drowned in crossing rivers, long, lonely forest rides, camp-meetings, preachings in cabins, sleepings in the open air.

“I was reminded of one comical experience as I was seeking on Market Street to find the old swale or shallow ravine which ran between my cottage and Mr. Bates’s dwelling. It had formerly been a kind of bayou in spring when the stream above town overflowed, but dried off in summer. To redeem it from unhealth a dike had been built to restrain the river and turn the superfluous freshets another way. But one year the levee gave way in the night; and when the morning rose, behold a flood between me and my neighbor! There was sport on hand! It was too deep for wading, but I could extemporize a boat. I brought down to the edge my wife’s large washing-tub, and intended with a bit of board to paddle about. No sooner was I in than I was out. The tub refused to stand on its own bottom. Well, well, said I, two tubs are better than one. So I got its mate, and, nailing two strips across to hold them fast together, I 209was sure that they were too long now to upset. So they were, in the long line; but sideways they went over, carrying me with them with incredible celerity. Tubs were one thing, boats another—that I saw plainly.

“I would not be baffled. I proposed a raft. Getting rails from the fence, I soon had tacked boards across—enough of them to carry my weight. Then, with a long pole, I began my voyage. Alas! it came to a ludicrous end.

“A rail fence ran across this ravine in the field, just above the street. One end of the fence had loosened, and the water had floated it round enough to break its connection with its hither side. A large but young dog belonging to a friend had walked along the fence, hoping to cross dry-footed, till he came to the abrupt termination, and, his courage failing him, he had crouched down and lay trembling and whining, afraid to go back or to venture the water. I poled my raft up to the rescue; and, getting alongside, coaxed him to jump aboard, but his courage was all gone. He looked up wistfully, but stirred not. ‘Well, you coward, you shall come aboard.’ Seizing him by the skin of the neck, I hauled him on to the raft, which instantly began to sink. It was buoyant enough for a man, but not for a man and a lubberly dog. There was nothing for it—as the stupid thing would not stir, I had to; and with a spring I reached the fence just abdicated by the dog, while he, the raft now coming to the surface again, went sailing down the pond and was safely landed below, while I was left in the crotch of the fence. One such experiment ought to serve for a life-time, but alas!

“There is no end of things gone by. They rise at every point; and one walks encompassed with memories which accompany him through the living streets like invisible spirits.”

Invitation to come East—Call to Plymouth Church—Friendly Misgivings—Plainly Outlining his Views—Early Success—Plymouth Burned—Preaching in the Tabernacle.

Mr. Beecher had confidently expected to have remained permanently in the West, and to have grown up with the new but rising country; but it was destined to be otherwise.

His fame had spread Eastward, and in the early winter of 1846 a tentative effort was made to call him thither. Mr. W. T. Cutler, returning from a visit at the West, wrote in December, 1846, to Mr. Beecher that Dr. Storrs had been called to the Church of the Pilgrims; that one of Dr. Cheever’s principal men, J. Hunt, had “observed to me that Dr. Cheever named you as the man for the Pilgrims, and he thinks that there will be new churches formed on the Congregational plan here and in Brooklyn, and that you are the man to build up one of them.” While in Cincinnati Mr. Cutler called on Dr. Lyman Beecher relative to his son’s going East, but “he set his face like flint against it.” He then had a long and urgent talk with the son again, in answer to which he received the following letter:

Mr. Beecher and his Father at the time of Call to Brooklyn.

Again in February Mr. Cutler wrote, this time asking pointedly if Mr. Beecher would accept a call to Brooklyn, stating that the property formerly owned by the First Presbyterian Church—Rev. Dr. Cox—had been purchased by Henry C. Bowen, Seth B. Hunt, and David Hale; that it would be vacant in May, and that they proposed to organize in it a new church on the Congregational plan; that if he would come they would give him a salary of $1,500 per annum, and, if necessary, make it $2,000. Mr. Cutler held out many alluring inducements, but without apparent effect. Mr. Beecher would not even entertain the proposition. In the meantime Mr. Cutler shrewdly reasoned that if he would come East, even for a short time, it might be possible to make him change his mind. It was so arranged that Mr. Beecher received an invitation from the American Home Missionary Society to deliver an address, under its auspices, at what was then called the “May Anniversaries” held in New York. He accepted this invitation, intending, as he said since, “to urge young men to go West, to show what a good field the West was, and to cast some fiery arrows at men that had worked there and got tired, and slunk away, and come back. I remember that I was particularly glowing on this subject; but I came East not knowing what I did. It was a trap. Brother Cutler (who has gone to heaven), it seems, had a little plan at that very time, and I was running into a noose, though I did not suspect it. The result of that visit was the formation of this church [Plymouth]. Mr. David Hale, of the Journal of Commerce—whose son Richard is still one of our members, though he is not with us—with two or three others, desired at once to extend me an invitation to become the pastor of this church. But the church did not exist. It was like asking a young man to become the husband of an unborn girl. There was no church to be my bride. I refused to receive a call to an empty house. They therefore made haste to form a church; and I think it was early in June of the same year that some twenty-five persons covenanted together over this very ground for the church as it 214then stood. The main building fronted on one street, and the lecture-room on the other. Here they agreed to become a church of Christ; and then they extended to me a call to be its pastor. The call was not publicly known until the October following; but still the mischief was done.”

On Sunday evening, June 13, 1847, Plymouth Church was formally organized with a membership of twenty-one, Rev. R. S. Storrs, of the Church of the Pilgrims, preaching the sermon.

On the Monday evening following business meetings were held by both the church and society, in each of which it was unanimously voted to invite Mr. Beecher to be their pastor, with a salary of fifteen hundred dollars the first year, seventeen hundred and fifty the second year, and two thousand the third year and thereafter.

A formal call was at once sent.

For the first time the question was taken into serious consideration, and for the next two months every argument was presented that might lead to an acceptance of the call, great stress being laid on the fact that in the larger field could be accomplished a more important work and an influence might be exerted that would be felt throughout the entire country; that the West could easily be reached from New York, when it might be difficult to reach New York from the West.

Long and most urgent letters were sent to Dr. Lyman Beecher, begging him to withhold any adverse influence. It is very doubtful if any of the inducements or the flattering representations so strongly presented had succeeded in winning him from the field where he was then working, were it not that another influence was silently and powerfully at work. The health of his wife, who literally was giving her very life to aid and sustain him in his work, was rapidly failing under the malarial influences of the West. It became very evident that she must have rest and a change of climate. A few years in the East might restore her health, then he could return and resume his work. In August he came to a decision, and on the 12th wrote his letter of resignation, in which he set out his reasons and plans:

Having decided, he wrote at once to the committee of Plymouth Church from whom he had received the call:

While in the East, after having received the call from Plymouth Church and while the question of acceptance was still in doubt, Mr. Beecher also received a call from the Park Street Church of Boston—the same church where he had preached nine years before, when on his way back to Lawrenceburg with his young wife.

On June 10, 1847, he received a letter from the Rev. Silas Aikens, the pastor of Park Street Church, stating that they very much desired Mr. Beecher to accept a call to the position of associate pastor.

Early in July a formal call was sent by the church and society to the same effect, but was shortly afterwards declined.

The call to Brooklyn having been definitely accepted, Mr. Beecher began at once to arrange for the removal of his family. His salary was in arrears. To meet the necessities of his family he had been obliged to borrow five hundred dollars. This, with other and smaller debts, must be paid, and money must be raised wherewith to transport his family East. But how? Fortunately this difficulty had been foreseen, and as soon as it seemed probable that the call would be accepted the friends at Plymouth Church, in prophecy of that generosity which characterized them in all after-years, promptly raised by subscription one thousand dollars, and notified Mr. Beecher to draw thereupon as he might need.

About the first of October, 1847, he started Eastward, leaving Indianapolis on the first passenger-train run on the new road just built. Modern luxuries had not then been introduced, if we may rely upon his account of the ride:

“The car was no car at all, a mere extempore wood-box, used sometimes without seats for hogs, but with seats for men, of which class I (ah me miserable!) happened to be one. And so at eleven at night I arrived in Madison, not overproud in the 217glory of riding on the first train that ever went from Indianapolis to Madison.”

October, 1847, marked a new era in Mr. Beecher’s experience. By successive steps he had advanced from field to field with steadily increasing responsibility, from the collegian tramping twenty miles to deliver an occasional address in some adjoining town on topics affecting public morals, to the young theologian still in the seminary, trying his powers in some little hamlet—a knight-errant breaking a lance with the adversary; to the young, unknown missionary entering the lists for his first real, earnest battle against “the world, the flesh, and the devil”; to the acknowledged preacher called to the State capital, dealing stalwart blows at those evils which sap the public conscience and allure the youth into evil ways, a recognized leader not only within the limits of his Presbytery but even throughout his State.

And at last, called to the metropolitan centre, he enters a field whose limits of influence were to be bounded only by the limits of the civilized globe. With each increase of influence came corresponding responsibilities. So far he had developed resources sufficient for each increase in his burdens; but would he be sufficient for this new experience? He had fully sustained himself as a missionary and a preacher in a pioneer State, in a comparatively rude and uncultured society. He had earned a reputation that had preceded him East; could he maintain it? Could he meet the requirements of the refined, critical, and highly-cultured metropolis (for New York and Brooklyn were, to all intents, one great centre)? Many feared, and kindly volunteered the information that neither the new church nor its new pastor would last many months.

He was altogether too outspoken for his own good, said they. It was all very well for a minister to combat evil, but he must do it in the good old-fashioned, orthodox way: he should confine himself to generalities and not be too specific. There were some things he ought not to meddle with: the pulpit was no place for politics, and slavery was purely a political question. He would find that in New York the public would not tolerate those things which had been permitted to him in Indiana.

If he persisted he would soon have empty pews to preach to, even if he did not have a personal demonstration of the folly of attacking those popular sins—sins which most of his clerical 218brothers had had the good sense to leave alone. Endless were the similes and metaphors indulged in, of which the well-worn rocket was perhaps the most suggestive.

Some amiable critics even went so far as to intimate that his success in the West was due more to the surreptitious use of the father’s old sermons than any inherent ability in the son, and he was generously given just one year to run through the barrelful of such sermons supposed to have been brought on with him. The barrel, like the widow’s oil-cruse, seems to have had a miraculous power of refilling.

Many friends advised him against the change: the risk was too great, his experience too little. He said of this time:

“In coming to Brooklyn I had but one single thought—that of zeal for Christ. I came under all manner of warnings and cautions. Many good brethren told me how men got puffed up in the city, what temptations I would encounter, and how I would very likely be conservative, and forget my zeal, and so on; and I was obliged at last to say even to my father: ‘Father, do you understand, then, that God’s grace only extends to the country, and that He cannot protect anybody in the city?’”

On the other hand, some counselled self-interest: “It is not necessary that you should settle in Brooklyn; with your talent you will make more show in New York.” “I didn’t come to make a show,” he replied. “I came to preach what I understand to be the Gospel of Jesus Christ to men, and this is the first opening, and I take it.”

He did not propose to have any misunderstanding on the part of his new church as to the course he should pursue. He intended to make that very plain and at the outset. If they wanted him they would have to take him with their eyes open—wide open.

October 10, the first Sunday after his arrival, he preached in the new church, both morning and evening.

“My first sermon, I think, was directed to the Source of all true religion—the Lord Jesus Christ and His power. In my second sermon—on the evening of the first Sunday—I recollect that I lifted up the banner and blew the trumpet in the application of Christianity to intemperance, to slavery, and to all other great national sins. I said to those who were present: ‘If you 219come into this church and congregation I want you to understand distinctly that I will wear no fetters; that I will be bound by no precedent; that I will preach the Gospel as I apprehend it, whether men will hear or whether they will forbear, and that I will apply it without stint, and sharply and strongly, to the overthrow of every evil and to the upbuilding of all that is good.’”

Well-meaning but timid friends took alarm at this bold declaration. It was not customary; it was not what they were used to; they came to him to “counsel him for his own good,” they said. “Save yourself, anyway; don’t ally yourself to unpopular men nor unpopular causes. There is no need of it. You can have your own notions about abolition; what is the use of preaching anti-slavery sermons?” To their great distress their counsels had just the opposite effect intended: “I despised them all, and preached like thunder on those subjects, especially before pew-renting. For a period of more than ten years I never let a month elapse before pew-renting that I did not come out with the whole strength of my nature on the abominations of American slavery. I remember saying, with some discourtesy and with language that I should not use now: ‘If you don’t want to hear such doctrines, don’t take a pew here next time.’ It had something of youthful eagerness in it, but I am proud that it pleased God to ally me to causes that were weak but right. It has ever been a cause of great gratification to me that I have not lost that spirit, and that I ally myself to that which I think to be right; and I do not care what man says to me, provided only I can believe that God likes it, and that I have the testimony of His approval in myself.”

To have remained silent in the presence of such great evils was to have shared the responsibility of their existence.

We quote here his views on this subject, uttered from his pulpit many years later:

“In every reform from intemperance, from vice, from crime, each individual citizen is responsible to the degree of influence which he has, and if he does not exert it he is responsible for a neglect of duty—a binding duty. He is bound to create a public sentiment that shall work for virtue. He is bound to drain the community of all those evils that run together and form a channel for vice and crime. It is not a matter of election, it is a 220matter of obligation; and because there are the most respectable classes in the community that don’t do it, you are not set free. Because the men of riches and the men of power and the men of standing in society don’t do it, the poorest laboring man in the community, if he does not, under the direction of his reason and conscience, labor for the purification of the commonwealth, is responsible to God. He is bound to do it. If his individuality on the one side has shielded him against aggression, it brings with it also certain obligations, and he is bound to meet them. All parties hold their members only subject to the corrected judgment and moral sense of the individual. If they go with their party on the general ground that it is going right and is doing right, as far as the limitations of human ignorance and human power are concerned, travelling in the right direction also with many imperfect steps and many imperfect elements, he may justly go on with it; but if he is committed, as were the parties of slavery, to so atrocious a wrong as that which violated the fundamental rights of the whole human family, a man is bound to fight the party, in and out of it: in it by correction, out of it by protest and opposition. And merely because he can say, ‘The party did it, I did not,’ he is not relieved of responsibility. Inasmuch as you knew what was right and did not do it, so much you are involved in the guilt; and there was a great deal of guilt. The Church itself was involved in the same—dumb pulpits, uncirculated Bibles, a corrupt and vicious public sentiment.

“When I came into Plymouth Church as its pastor there was probably hardly a single church in the bounds of New York or Brooklyn of any note that dared to say a word for the liberty of the abject slave. Was I wrong in protesting against it, with the knowledge that I had? With the conscience that I had, had I been silent I should have been doomed justly to the stroke of God’s righteous judgment; and the want of moral courage under such circumstances is a very great sin everywhere. You are not right to stand still in any great party, moving in any direction, doing wrong, without deliberately taking account with yourself. Am I striving to correct the evil by all the influence I can wield? On finding that to be impossible, do I free myself from all imputation of partnership in any such guilt, one way or the other?”

221Now it is easy enough to express such sentiments: it is popular; it is in the line of public sentiment. Then it was a very different matter, and the living up to them still more difficult.

Recalling the early history of Plymouth Church, he said:

“It was formed in the midst of the development of the greatest work of the modern century—the emancipation of the slaves in America, by which the industry of the Continent was also emancipated, and by which the Church and religion itself were saved from a worse than Babylonian captivity.

“When I came here you could get no great Missionary Society, Bible Society, or Tract Society to say one solitary word for the slave. Such were the interests of the mercantile classes of the South that it was extremely difficult to exert there any anti-slavery influence. As the merchants largely held the funds, as the great societies needed support, and as churches were built by respectable men whose prosperity depended mainly upon the peace and order of the South, the position that this church took was a bold and unpopular one. Those who did not live then can have no conception of what it was to form a church that should stand right out in the intense light of the time, and declare for universal liberty and for the right of the slave to the Bible, and to full religious freedom. This church grew up right against a flinty way of bitterness and opposition.”

Such was the beginning, and such the times!

Although he began preaching in Plymouth Church, October 10, 1847, Mr. Beecher was not formally installed until the 11th of November following. On that day an ecclesiastical council was convened “by letters from the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, in the State of New York, at their lecture-room, ... for the purpose of installing (if the way should be found clear) the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher as their pastor,” etc.

“After an extended and thorough examination of the pastor-elect respecting his views of the doctrine of natural and revealed religion, his experience of renewing and sanctifying grace, and his object in entering on the work of the Christian ministry, the council unanimously pronounced the examination sustained and voted to proceed to installation.”

The invocation and reading of the Scriptures was by the Rev. Dr. Humphrey, of Pittsfield, Mass.; the sermon by Rev. Dr. Edward Beecher, of the Salem Church of Boston, an older brother 222of the new pastor; the installing prayer by Rev. Dr. Hewitt, of the Second Congregational Church of Bridgeport; the charge to the pastor by Rev. Dr. Lansing, of the Second Congregational Church of New York; the fellowship of the churches by Rev. R. S. Storrs, Jr., of the Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn; address to the people by Rev. J. P. Thompson, of the Broadway Tabernacle, New York, and the concluding prayer by Rev. Dr. Bushnell, of the North Church of Hartford.

As soon as he was fairly installed the pastor set himself vigorously to work to build up the young church, and to fill it with new converts.

The audience-room of the church began to fill rapidly, in the morning being generally three-fourths full, and in the evening entirely full. Early in 1848 difficulty was found in accommodating those who wished to attend, the building being crowded from that time on, both night and morning.

In the spring, daily morning prayer-meetings were held, under the conduct of the pastor. Soon revivals broke out in the church, which, though singularly free from undue excitement, produced a deep and wide-spread influence. More than seventy persons were converted, most of them joining Plymouth Church, the rest uniting with other evangelical churches.

Notwithstanding the many doleful prophecies that greeted its early beginnings, and the “dangerous stand” taken by its pastor which alarmed so many conservative minds, the church was just perverse enough to prosper and grow rapidly—a perversity which characterized it for the next forty years. In a little over two years from its birth it had an enrolled membership of four hundred and four, of whom fifty-six joined in 1847; one hundred and fifty-two in 1848; one hundred and thirty-six in 1849 (the year of the fire), and sixty in the first part of 1850.

On the 13th of January, 1849, occurred one of those fortunate mishaps which proved to be a blessing in disguise. For some time previous, the congregation had been greatly disproportioned to the capacity of the church; the necessity of rebuilding began to be seriously discussed, when occurred a fire that abruptly terminated the discussion. The building was so badly damaged that it was unanimously determined to rebuild rather than repair.

The kindly sympathy of neighboring churches, in volunteering 223the use of their buildings for the houseless congregation, was gratefully accepted for a short time.

It soon became apparent that this unsettled and migratory condition was harmful to the church. It was therefore determined to erect a temporary structure upon ground in Pierrepont Street, kindly offered by Mr. Lewis Tappan. In thirty days a building, one hundred by eighty feet, was put up, and in this the church made its home until the first Sunday in January, 1850.

The whole expense of this “Tabernacle,” as it was called, was twenty-eight hundred dollars. The subsequent sale of the building, together with the weekly collections, more than repaid this outlay, while the pew-rents were amply sufficient to meet the current expenses.

As soon as possible after the fire, steps were taken to put up the new building, which was to be constructed on a much larger scale than the old one.

On May 29, 1849, the corner-stone was laid, and on the first Sunday in January, 1850, the congregation worshipped in their new church.

The new structure was built on Orange Street, and ran through to Pineapple. It was really two buildings under one roof, the church proper being one hundred and five feet long by eighty broad. Adjoining and opening into this, from the rear, was a lecture-room of two stories, eighty by fifty feet, the second story being the Sunday-school.

The entire cost of the new church was about $36,000, of which $31,127 was raised upon scrip, bearing interest, payable in pew-rents. To provide for the balance, and a mortgage of $10,500 on the old property, the new building was mortgaged for $16,000. The entire indebtedness and all encumbrances were paid off by 1867, at which time the church was entirely free from debt.

The cost of the lecture-room and Sabbath-school was about $13,000, of which $10,800 were donated, the rest being paid partly by festivals and fairs held for the purpose, and partly from the general fund of the church.

The Sabbath-school at this time consisted of two hundred and fifty scholars and thirty teachers.

The seating capacity of the pews and choir-gallery of the church was about twenty-one hundred persons. This was 224thought at first, by some, to be a very extravagant allowance. But in 1857 the seating capacity could not supply the demand, and folding-seats were placed in the aisles, fixed to the end of each pew, and so constructed as to fold up against the pew-side when not in use; while benches were set along the walls all around the galleries, and in the vacant space in front of the pulpit. These accommodated about eight hundred more, while the standing space, almost always occupied during the last twenty-five years, permitted about three hundred more to be present.

As his last year at Indianapolis had been consecrated by the loss of his little boy, so in like manner were the first in his new pastorate. Scarce had a month passed when the death of his little girl “Caty” became the means of closer communion between pastor and people through the bonds of sympathy and kind service. He wrote to his sister:

“When Caty sickened and began her quiet march toward the once opened gate, to rejoin the brother (cherub pair), we found our house full of friends. Many of the truest, deepest hearts asked no bidding, but, with instinctive heart taught right, lived with us almost literally; and when her form was to go forth from us, they embowered her in flowers, winter though it seemed, and every thought and remembrance of her is sweet in itself and sweet in its suggestions.

“What had I to bear up against? I was held up by increasing love and sympathy on every side. Of this world I had more than heart could wish; of friends, never so many or so worth having; and the effect, as might be supposed, has answered to the cause. I find now that it is with me as with mountains in spring-time—every fissure is growing to a rill, every patch of soil is starting its flowers, every shrub has its insect and every tree its bird.”

Plymouth Church—The New Building—Sabbath Service—Prayer-Meeting—Weekly Lecture—Socials—Church Polity—The Pastor’s Policy.

As we have stated, Plymouth Church took possession of its new building on the first Sabbath in January, 1850. Then, as on the Sabbaths of the nearly forty succeeding years in which Mr. Beecher ministered here, the crowd came and filled every available seat. Then began that sound, once heard never forgotten, and heard nowhere else so continuously, of the incoming multitude, the tread of hurrying feet like the sound of many waters, as the crowds, held back for a time until pew-holders have been in part accommodated, press in and take their places. Here, on this first Sabbath, arose that song of thanksgiving whose fulness and power were for so many years a marked feature of the religious service of this great congregation. Here began that long succession of sermons which opened to so many thousands, at first by the voice and then by the printing-press; the nearness, the righteousness, and the boundless love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. And here began on that day to ascend those prayers which drew hearts into the very presence of the Most High and left them gladdened, refreshed, and filled as with the fulness of God. Blessed old Plymouth Church! Its every memory, its very walls are dear unto multitudes.

It was plain even to bareness—unnecessarily so in the opinion of many—both without and within, with not the slightest effort at show or even ornament. None of those harmonies of color nor graces of form, such as are now shown or attempted in almost every church edifice, were here found. It was builded with the simple conscientious purpose of enabling as many as possible to hear the Gospel, of affording every advantage to such as wished to meet together in the prayer-meeting and sociable, and of instructing the young in the Sunday-school. Herein lay the beauty of the Plymouth Church building: its excellent adaptation to the great end in view. More than any church of that day, and, with all the progress of later times, excelled by but 226few, if any, at the present time, Plymouth Church building afforded superior accommodations for Gospel hearing and spiritual, educational, and social training. By placing the seats in a partial curve, by the admirable arrangement of the commodious galleries, and by pushing the pulpit well forward toward the centre of the circle, the vast audience of nearly three thousand people were brought near together and near to the speaker. While this enabled him to address them with great ease, it also afforded an opportunity for the cultivation of that feeling of homeness and fraternity that always characterized the gatherings of this church with its pastor.

The pulpit was then, as now, a plain platform, with no railing in front, and no other furniture than a set of chairs, a stand for notices, and an open table for the Bible; as far removed as possible from those boxes where the man must stand, cramped and stiff, while he delivers his message. An offering of flowers was also found there, the beginning of a custom which has been continued, we believe, without the failure of a single Sabbath, from that day to this.

Behind the pulpit was the organ and seats for a choir of fifty or more who should lead the great congregation in their songs of praise.

In the rear of the audience-room, opening back into another street, was the lecture and prayer-meeting room, and above this were the parlors and the Sunday-school rooms.

Such was the equipment that the pastor and Plymouth Church began to use on that first Sabbath in 1850. It seemed to many more than ample. The audience-room was more commodious than any in the land. Would the young minister be able to fill it? Would he hold out? The “six months” that one of Brooklyn’s most oracular of D.D.’s had given “that young man to run out in” had long since passed, and he gave, as yet, no signs of waning popularity; but perhaps he will, and a few possibly hoped, and some, it may be, feared, that it would be so; but by far the larger part of that great congregation praised God that day in joyful confidence without any fears or misgivings. They had faith in their pastor as well as in God; and he, conscious that he had builded sincerely, without sham or pretence, had no question but that He who had begun this good work would carry it prosperously forward to the end. All these appliances 227had been demanded by the thousands in attendance. Their necessity was of God, hence they could trust Him to vindicate His own plans. The young pastor neither feared nor was anxious. He was the Lord’s; let Him do with him as He pleased.

Of this feeling in connection with his preaching he himself says: “I had at that time almost a species of indifference as to means and measures. I cared little, and perhaps too little, whether I had or had not a church building. I thought of one thing—the love of Christ to men. This, to me, was a burning reality. Less clearly than now, perhaps, did I discern the whole circuit and orb of the nature of Christ; but with a burning intensity I realized the love of God in Jesus Christ. I believed it to be the one transcendent influence in this world by which men should be roused to a higher manhood and should be translated into another and better kingdom. My purpose was to preach Christ to men for the sake of bringing them to a higher life; and though I preferred the polity and economy of the Congregational churches, yet I also felt that God was in all the other churches, and that it was no part of my ministry to build up sectarian walls; that it was no part of my ministry to bombard and pull down sectarian structures; but that the work of my ministry was to find the way to the hearts of men, and to labor with them for their awakening and conversion and sanctification.

“I have said that I had no theory; but I had a very strong impression on my mind that the first five years in the life of a church would determine the history of that church and give to it its position and genius; that if the earliest years of a church were controversial or barren it would take scores of years to right it; but that if a church were consecrated, active, and energetic during the first five years of its life, it would probably go on through generations developing the same features. My supreme anxiety, therefore, in gathering a church, was to have all of its members united in a fervent, loving disposition; to have them all in sympathy with men; and to have all of them desirous of bringing to bear the glorious truths of the Gospel upon the hearts and consciences of those about them.

“Consequently I went into this work with all my soul, preaching night and day, visiting incessantly, and developing as fast 228and as far as might be that social, contagious spirit which we call a revival of religion.”

The services in the church were then, as ever since, in harmony with the building—simple and without ostentation, differing from those of other Congregational churches only in the spirit of unusual heartiness and the impression of unusual power.

When the bell ceased tolling the organ began its work of preparing the hearts of the great multitude for worship. Then followed the invocation by the pastor, always devout, always joyful and trustful, uniformly sincere, and always varied. No set phrase ever took possession and held in its formal grasp the expression of his praise and expectant prayer:

“Thou that dost hold the sun, and pour forth therefrom the light and glory of the day, from Thine own self let there come, streaming as the daylight, those influences that shall awake in us all hope and all gladness of love. For we sleep except when Thy beams are upon us. Only when we are in God are we alive. Let us in, O our Father! and may all that is within us rise up to worship Thee. Accept our service according to what we would do and according to what Thou wouldst have us do. Bless the word and the reading thereof. Bless our songs of praise and our fellowship therein. Bless our communion one with another and with Thee. Bless us in our meditation, in the services of the day, at home, and everywhere. Make this a golden day to our souls, through Jesus Christ our Redeemer. Amen.”

Then followed, in those early days—in later years he often omitted it—the reading of the hymn, simply, with no straining after effect, but so as to give the full meaning of the words to be sung, and in a measure to interpret their spirit. The singing which followed, so full and appreciative, was something to remember. It was the voices of the multitude joining and blending in one great, full song of adoration and thanksgiving.

The reading of the Scripture was usually without comment, but so vivid to his thought were the great truths uttered, and so flexible was his voice in giving them expression, and so natural the adaptation of his whole manner to their import, that his simple reading gave a better understanding of Scripture than the explanations of most other men.

The prayer that followed the hymn was very marked in its 229general characteristics, comprehensive, and adapted to the occasion and the needs of the people before him. It invariably gave expression to a thankful spirit, lamented sins and failures, was permeated with a yearning desire for communion with God and with great sympathy with men, class after class of whom he brought before the Heavenly Father for deliverance, comfort, and blessing.

The sermon was long, consuming from three-quarters of an hour to an hour, and sometimes more, in delivery, and usually combined in a very marked degree the three elements, the exegetical, the philosophic, and the hortatory. He delighted in giving a full and broad opening of Scripture, that all might be quickened and fed; in showing the relation and harmony of the truths thus presented to other truths already admitted, making their bearings clear by frequent illustrations, and pressing them in the progress of the sermon, and especially at the close, upon the acceptance of his hearers. His preaching informed, convinced, inspired, and moved men to decisive action Godward, or it was, in his view, a failure.

The benediction with which the services closed was as if he saw the hands of the living Saviour stretched out over His beloved people, and he became but a mouthpiece for the solemn and tender expression of His beneficence.

Then followed the informal after-meeting, unadvertised and unarranged—the pressing forward to the pulpit, or the waiting in the aisles until he should pass out, of some who perhaps had a word of thanks for help received in the sermon, of others asking questions or bearing messages, of strangers who wished to press his hand, or of troubled ones who wanted a word of cheer. The meeting continued down the aisle, out into the porch, out on to the street, as friends still walked along with him, talking as they went.

The weekly meetings of the church, besides Sabbath services and the Sunday-school, at this early period, were three: a “Lecture,” Tuesday evening; a “Sociable,” Thursday evening; and a Prayer-meeting, Friday evening.

The weekly lecture was a familiar meeting of the church family and their friends, where, in simple and colloquial speech, the pastor instructed them in the things that pertain to the spiritual life. It was always spoken of, not as a sermon, but as a 230“Lecture-Room Talk.” The subjects chosen were practical, like these, given in the order in which he delivered them: “Groping after God,” “Praying for Others,” “Fervency of Religious Feeling,” “Conversing with the Impenitent,” picked up in his intercourse with his people, selected with direct reference to solving doubts, removing difficulties, and securing spiritual growth and activity. In these, perhaps more than anywhere else, he displayed the resources of his great common sense, revealed the depth of his spiritual life, and drew most largely on the wealth of his own Christian experience.

The prayer-meetings did not differ in form from those that are common in Congregational churches. A moment before the hour for the meeting Mr. Beecher came upon the platform, threw his hat upon the floor by the side of his chair, sat down, and, throwing back his cloak, took up the “Plymouth Collection,” and, the instant the bell ceased tolling, without rising, gave out in a clear, firm voice the number of some familiar hymn, usually of thanksgiving. The pianist wasted no time in playing the tune through, but struck the opening note firmly, the audience joined without delay and sang without dragging, and the meeting gained that most important advantage—a good send-off. No sooner had the hymn ceased than the pastor arose and read a passage from a Bible which he held in his hand. He then led in a prayer, simple, confiding, hopeful, tender, that helped all weary and waiting souls to realize that they were in the presence of their very best Friend, and gave them needed help. Another hymn, given out in the same manner and sung with the same spirit, followed. Then, that there might be no break in the movement of the service, looking at the individual addressed, usually some one of the old warriors upon the front seats, he would say, “Will Brother ——— lead us in prayer?” When this prayer was finished his eye seemed to take a broader range and search out some of the younger and less experienced to bring them into the work. Woe be to you then if you have come in late, taken a back seat, and tried to keep out of sight! He seemed to know instinctively where you were, and how you felt, and how essential, if you would enjoy the meeting, that this ice should be broken; and on this second call for leaders you would be very likely to hear your name pronounced with that same kind but authoritative intonation that you could neither pretend not to hear 231nor refuse to obey. Another hymn increases the kindly warmth of Christian feeling that has begun to pervade the audience like an atmosphere, and under its inspiration other prayers are offered, at this stage by volunteers; experiences are related, often by the pastor; questions are asked upon some practical difficulty, and answers are given; failures and sins are confessed and lamented, and prayers are requested and offered, until the hour was passed all too quickly. Another hymn, and then the benediction closes the meeting.

The social meetings, for the accommodation of which Mr. Beecher added the parlors—at that time an unusual feature of a church—were a very earnest attempt made by him in the meridian of his social power and enthusiasm, and in a church more than ordinarily inspired by his loving spirit, to overcome the separations which different conditions and dissimilar social training and surroundings bring about in the Church of Christ, and to realize as nearly as possible the family ideal. A sewing-meeting was held in the afternoon for some benevolent enterprise, followed by a plain tea to which all were invited. Friends dropped in, pleasant conversation ensued, and perhaps a few selections of reading or song, prepared for the occasion, were given. “Mr. Beecher then took his stand in the centre of the large room, rapped with his pencil and called his flock around him, and gave them ten minutes of appreciative, kindly, witty, helpful talk. ‘Plymouth Collection of Hymns’ was then handed round, and everybody sang, or tried to. After this, prayer and ‘good-night.’” This was about the outline, and for several years it was moderately successful; but busy times crowded in upon it, unregulated elements worked into it, getting and doing more harm than good, and at length it was given up, and the members of Plymouth Church chose their companions according to social affinities, similarity of position, and circumstances, like other people.

Such preaching and labors, with such appliances, under the blessing of God were sure to bring abundant results, and revivals followed each other in quick succession all through those early years; in fact, Plymouth Church thus far during its whole history may be called a revival church.

Its polity was Congregational, as we find in its manual of 1850:

232“This church is an independent ecclesiastical body, and in matters of doctrine, order, and discipline is amenable to no other organization. This church will extend to other evangelical churches and receive from them that fellowship, advice, and assistance which the laws of Christ require.”

His own policy toward the church is given in these words:

“I have never managed. I have never employed management. I have tried to inspire kind feelings and thus lead men to take up their crosses. I have never sought to exert my authority, but to promote the utmost freedom of thought and action.... I have maintained from the beginning the most profound desire that there should be a church-life among you quite independent of me, and that as the pulpit was independent, so should the pews be also. I have scrupulously avoided meddling with the liberties of this church, except to enforce them. My simple aim from the beginning has been to develop among you as high a standard of manhood, and of Christian manhood, as the infirmity of human nature would permit; and for that—the exaltation of manhood in Christ Jesus—I have labored in season and out of season: not without flaw, not without fault, not without sin, but, as God is my witness, with every power of my soul and body and understanding, from year to year.”

Such was Plymouth Church as she stood a score and a half and more years ago, and as she still remains.

“Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth is this our Mount Zion” well expresses the feelings of multitudes as they recall these years and remember these places. Her streets of Sabbath service and work-day conference and prayer were continually trodden by eager crowds, and were made beautiful and attractive by the Christian fellowship that grew up and blossomed here on every side under the inspiration and culture of one who himself so trustfully, hopefully, and exultingly walked with God.

Beginning of the Great Battle—Five Great Eras—Compromise Measures of 1850—“Shall We Compromise”—The Fugitive Slave Law Denounced—Right of Free Speech Defended—Commercial Liberty—Fighting Caste—Liberty of the Pulpit Defended—Quickness of Retort—Sentiment of the Times—Reaction—Visit of Kossuth—Election of 1852—The Parker Controversy—Degraded into Liberty—John Mitchel—Garrison—Close of this Era.

Other things than opening the church building contributed to make 1850 an eventful year to Henry Ward Beecher.

In that year slavery came to the place of supreme interest in our national affairs which it never afterwards lost until it was swept away in the battle-storm of 1861-65.

The very month that Plymouth Church took possession of its new house, the first month of the last half of the nineteenth century, Henry Clay submitted a series of resolutions in the Senate of the United States as “compromise measures for a final and complete adjustment of the slavery question.” In the debate, passage, and enforcement of these measures, the utterly antagonistic nature of the two contending elements, liberty and slavery, which had been brought together under our Constitution, became so evident; slavery, from the very necessity of self-preservation, became so aggressive, advanced claims so comprehensive and so forced the fighting, that the very measures intended to compromise the whole difficulty made it clear that there could be no compromise. There could be no amicable adjustment of interests so diametrically opposed; one or the other, liberty or slavery, must take undivided and undisputed possession of the government. From debate of words the conflict passed rapidly to the argument of arms, first on the plains of Kansas and eventually over the whole southern half of our country, developing into the greatest civil war ever known in the world’s history—a 234war in comparison with which, in the numbers engaged on either side, in the breadth of the battle-field, in the agents of destruction employed and the important interests at stake, England’s Wars of the Roses, and even the strife of the rival claimants for the imperial purple of Rome, were insignificant and secondary contests.

The part of this great slavery conflict in which Mr. Beecher was actively engaged had five distinct eras, clearly marked by well-defined boundaries, each presenting peculiar difficulties of its own to be overcome, and each bringing forward peculiar and important questions for solution. The first began with the agitation of the Compromise measures of 1850, and ended in the passage of those measures and their enforcement, more or less complete, during the uneasy years of 1850 and 1853.

The second began with the proposition to repeal the Missouri Compromise measures and continued through what was known as “The Kansas Struggle,” until April 1, 1858, when the first substantial victory ever won by the free States was gained in Congress in the permission to give the actual residents of Kansas a fair vote upon the question of the acceptance or rejection of the infamous Lecompton Constitution.

The third began with the abandonment by the slave-power of its dependence upon legislative enactments, which its defeat in Kansas had proved to be futile, and the inauguration of an era of secession and violence, and ended with the Proclamation of Emancipation, which took effect January 1, 1863, and which legally destroyed slavery in all the States in rebellion, and substantially within the whole domain of the United States.

The fourth era began with the issuing the Proclamation of Emancipation; extended through two years and more of battle by which the proclamation was carried into effect, and slavery was destroyed de facto as it had already been de jure, and foreign intervention was prevented; and ended with raising the flag over Sumter, the sign of the restoration of our national authority over a free and undivided national domain.

The fifth includes the period of reconstruction, in which the difficult task of bringing the States, once in rebellion but now submissive, back into the Union was successfully accomplished. It covers the ground from the close of the war to the present time, or, more properly, from the death of President Lincoln, 235when the South lay prostrate at the feet of the victorious North, to the election of President Cleveland, when, as Mr. Beecher hoped and believed, sectional lines were obliterated and the South once more saw the candidate she favored raised to be the chief magistrate of our common country.

The Compromise measures of 1850 were conceived for the purpose of removing the serious and dangerous complications that had arisen, between the North and the South, in the attempt to organize the territory recently acquired from Mexico, and in admitting California as a free State with a constitution for ever prohibiting slavery within her borders. The South felt that such an addition to the free States would so disturb the balance of power between the sections that something must be given her as a compensation. Hence these Compromise measures, which provided for the admission of California as a free State, but gave the South, as an offset, a more stringent Fugitive Slave Law and paid Texas ten millions of dollars for the adjustment of her State boundaries. Honestly intended, no doubt, and urged by the mover, Henry Clay, and accepted by many who disliked it, from patriotic motives, this Compromise was, nevertheless, wrong in principle and proved only mischievous in results. It rested on the false theory that the development of both liberty and slavery was equally the duty of the Republic, and that whatever gain was made by the former must be equalized to the latter by some new concession, and led to constantly increasing disturbance in both sections. While failing to satisfy the more radical men of the South, it was utterly abhorrent to a much larger body at the North. It seemed to the latter to be but another great step taken by the slave-power in its attempt to gain possession of the whole land. The first had been the Missouri Compromise, in which slavery, surrendering what it never owned—viz., the territory north of 36° 30′, called Mason and Dixon’s line—gained Missouri and a quasi right to all territory south of that line. In this second great step now proposed they did not fail to note that the provision to prohibit slavery in the newly-acquired territories, called the “Wilmot Proviso,” had been defeated in Congress, nor fail to see that in these Compromise measures, should they be carried, the slave-power would secure the right to hunt and capture its fugitives in every city, town, and home of the free States, and to compel every Northern citizen to aid in the work, 236thus making, so far as fugitives were concerned, slave territory of the whole North. They saw in this measure a great advance towards nationalizing this institution and securing for it the right, aimed at by its advocates from the first, to go unquestioned and protected wherever the authority of the Constitution of the United States was recognized. If this were passed they felt it to be not at all improbable that the threat of Senator Toombs, of Georgia, to call the roll of his slaves from the steps of Bunker Hill Monument, would be executed, and they opposed it with an energy born both of conviction and abhorrence. In this opposition none were more strenuous than Mr. Beecher. Speaking of this period, he says:

“In 1850, when the controversy came up about Clay’s Omnibus Bill, including the Fugitive Slave Laws, I was thoroughly roused, and in the pulpit and with my pen I attacked with the utmost earnestness the infamous Fugitive Slave Bill. It was then that I wrote that article, ‘Shall we Compromise?’ It was read to John C. Calhoun on his sick-bed by his clerk, and he raised himself up and said: ‘Read that article again.’ The article was read. ‘The man who says that is right. There is no alternative. It is liberty or slavery.’ And then, when Webster made his fatal apostasy on March 7, 1850, I joined with all Northern men of any freedom-loving spirit in denouncing it and in denouncing him. Forthwith, after a paralysis of a few weeks, his friends determined to save him by getting all the old clergymen—such men as Dr. Spring, Dr. Lord of Dartmouth, and the Andover professors—to take his part. The effort was to get every great and influential man in the North to stand up for Webster; and then it was that I flamed. They failed utterly. Professor Woolsey of New Haven, Dr. Bacon, Dr. Hopkins, President of Williams College in Massachusetts, and various other most influential men, absolutely refused to sustain Webster.”

In the issue of the Independent of February 21, 1850, filling three columns, we have the famous article referred to above. We quote only enough to indicate its spirit and line of argument:^[5]

“Mr. Clay’s Compromise has been violently resisted by the South and but coldly looked upon by the North.

“It is not that both sides are infatuated and refuse a reasonable settlement; but the skill of Mr. Clay has evidently not touched the seat of the disease. He either has not perceived or else has not thought it expedient to meet the real issue now before the people of the United States. The struggle now going on is a struggle whose depths lie in the organization of society in the North and South respectively; whose causes are planted in the Constitution. There are two incompatible and mutually destructive principles wrought together in the government of this land.... These elements are slavery and liberty.... One or the other must die.

”... The South now demands room and right for extension. She asks the North to be a partner. For every free State she demands one State for slavery. One dark orb must be swung into its orbit, to groan and travail in pain, for every new orb of liberty over which the morning stars shall sing for joy.

“... It is time for good men and true to gird up their loins and stand forth for God and humanity. No compromises can help us which dodge the question, certainly none which settle it for slavery....

“There never was a plainer question for the North. It is her duty openly, firmly, and for ever to refuse to slavery another inch of territory, and to see to it that it never gets it by fraud. It is her duty to refuse her hand or countenance to slavery where it now exists. It is her duty to declare that she will under no consideration be a party to any farther inhumanity and injustice....

“Mr. Clay’s Compromise resolutions demand better provision for the recovery of fugitive slaves, and a bill is now pending in the United States Senate for that purpose. On this matter our feelings are so strong that we confess a liability to intemperance of expression.

“If the compromises of the Constitution include requisitions which violate humanity, I will not be bound by them. Not even the Constitution shall make me unjust. If my patriotic sires confederated in my behalf that I should maintain that instrument, 238so I will to the utmost bound of right. But who, with power which even God denies to Himself, shall by compact fore-ordain me to the commission of inhumanity and injustice? I disown the act. I repudiate the obligation. Never while I have breath will I help any official miscreant in his base errand of recapturing a fellow-man for bondage; and may my foot palsy and my right hand forget her cunning if I ever become so untrue to mercy and to religion as not by all the means in my power to give aid and succor to every man whose courageous flight tells me he is worthy of liberty!

”... From those compromises, like Mr. Clay’s, which seek for peace rather than for humanity—from such compromises, guileless though they seem, and gilded till they shine like heaven, evermore may we be delivered.”

This battle in Congress resulted, like every battle since the adoption of the Constitution, in a victory for the slave party. In September of this year, 1850, the Compromise measures, which had passed both Houses of Congress, were signed by President Fillmore and became by a very decided majority the law of the land. Many things had contributed to this result. On the one hand, there was a strong party in the South, representing largely the sentiment of that whole section, who felt themselves aggrieved and deprived of their rights under the Constitution, since they could not carry their property with them into the common territory of the Union, and who saw in these Compromise measures a step in the direction of nationalizing their peculiar institution; on the other the commercial and manufacturing interests of the North demanded a cessation of strife, that they might enter into the prosperity opened to them by the discovery of the gold upon our Western coast; again, the fear of disruption, if the bitter discussion in Congress should continue, reconciled many to such measures as promised peace; also, the habit of compromise, which had been early formed, and stood apparently justified by years of prosperity and growth, made it easier to again adopt this course; and, perhaps more influential than any other, the leaders most beloved and trusted at the North were in favor of the measure. Henry Clay was its originator, and Daniel Webster, the great expounder of the Constitution, in his fatal speech of March 7, 1850, had justified the Compromise measures, spoke not a word in condemnation of the legal or moral 239crudities and enormities of the Fugitive Slave Law, and had reserved the lightning of his sarcasm and the thunder of his condemnation for the Abolitionists:

“Nothing can be plainer than that all parties in the state were drifting in the dark, without any comprehension of the elemental causes at work. Without prescience or sagacity, like ignorant physicians, they prescribed at random; they sewed on patches, new compromises on old garments, sought to conceal the real depth of the danger of the gathering torrent by crying peace! peace! to each other. In short, they were seeking to medicate volcanoes and stop earthquakes by administering political quinine. The wise statesmen were bewildered and politicians were juggling fools.”

If the anti-slavery men of the North hated the Compromise, and especially the Fugitive Slave clause in it, while it was being debated in Congress, their abhorrence was increased a thousand-fold now that all it had cost and all it threatened was in a measure comprehended. Looking at it calmly, they saw that safe-guards which from time immemorial had gathered around the individual to protect him in person and liberty had, for a very large class in the community, been suddenly destroyed.

Trial by jury was denied. Opportunity for the accused to summon witnesses in his own defence was not given, and “in no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitives be admitted to evidence.” He had no hearing before any competent judge, but before a commissioner appointed to take depositions, who, whatever his ability or lack of ability, was clothed by this infamous act with plenary power in the premises.

On the simple certificate of this man the unhappy victim was hurried off at once into slavery, and no stay of proceedings or liberty of appeal was granted. Dumb, undefended, his destiny at the mercy of any accuser, and of a commissioner possibly ignorant and possibly vicious, the accused was consigned to a state worse to many than death.

Aimed at a particular class, its injustice was seen to be indiscriminate enough to make an attack possible upon individuals of any class; and its provisions for the deprivation of a single right made necessary such a stringency in the exercise of other rights as could not be tolerated in a free community.

240Atrocious in itself, it became still more offensive and dangerous by reason of the ease with which its provisions could be employed by villains for kidnapping negroes, or even white men, who had never been slaves. It was stated and believed that along the whole line between the slave and free States arresting fugitives at once became a regular business, with very little care in many instances as to the previous liberty or slavery of those arrested. Instances were continually being recorded of colored boys and girls being unexpectedly spirited away and hurried off into bondage. Great activity in this work of securing fugitives who had lived in the North for years prevailed, and fear and apprehension took possession of the whole negro population of that section, and a corresponding indignation grew hot in the hearts of multitudes of freemen.

Scenes and incidents were continually transpiring and published in the newspapers that stirred the one party to greater hatred of the institution of slavery, and the other party to greater hatred to the means, regular or irregular, that were employed to prevent the carrying out of its purpose.

As may well be supposed, Mr. Beecher speaks with no greater affection for this measure, now that it has become a law, than when it was being debated in Congress.

In a Star paper that appeared October 3, upon “The Fugitive Slave Bill at its Work,” he meets it with undisguised and open defiance. “With such solemn convictions no law impious to God and humanity shall have respect or observance at our hands. If in God’s providence fugitives ask bread or shelter, raiment or conveyance, from us, my own children shall lack bread before they; my own flesh shall sting with cold ere they shall lack raiment; I will both shelter them, conceal them, or speed their flight, and while under my shelter or my convoy they shall be to me as my own flesh and blood; and whatsoever defence I would put forth for my own children, that shall these poor, despised, and persecuted creatures have in my house or upon the road.”

He follows with another very thoughtful and able article upon “Law and Conscience” in defence of his position, and for the instruction of those who were in doubt what course to take in the conflicting claims of the law of the land on one side and their feelings of humanity upon the other.

241In the first place, he makes the duty of obedience to law very strong:

“Nothing could be more mischievous than the prevalence of the doctrine that a citizen may disobey an unjust or burdensome law. Should that liberty be granted, the bad, the selfish, the cruel and grasping, might disregard wholesome laws as easily as just men unjust laws. It would constitute every man a court in his own case; and a court, too, in which selfishness would preside. Society could not exist for a day.

“It is a question seriously asked by thousands: How can we as good citizens subscribe to such wholesome doctrine and yet openly resist the Fugitive Slave Law? Many reasons make it important that this question should be thoroughly answered. There are thousands who say that this law must be obeyed, and who, with the next breath, bravely and generously declare that nevertheless, should a distressed fugitive ask succor, shelter, and guidance at their hand, he should have them. But this is breaking the law. To keep this law you must not shelter a slave mother fleeing to her free husband in the North, nor a slave girl whose foot bounds at the sound of a pursuer, as if it were the knell of virtue. You must not give direction to a fugitive, though his head be white and his old limbs reveal half a century of unrequited toil; though a man say to you, in the awful agony of his soul, ‘Kill me, but for the love of God do not betray me!’ the law enjoins you to go with the officer, if he summon you, and help in his arrest! The minister of the Gospel, the humane philanthropist, peacefully walking to the Sabbath-sounding bell, must turn aside and help some scoundrel hireling to run down his slave, if the marshal command him, or break the law!”

He then lays down this general principle:

“Every citizen must obey a law which inflicts injury upon his person, estate, and civil privilege, until legally redressed; but no citizen is bound to obey a law which commands him to inflict injury upon another. We must endure but never commit wrong. We must be patient when sinned against, but must never sin against others. The law may heap injustice upon me, but no law can authorize me to pour injustice upon another. When the law commanded Daniel not to pray he disobeyed it; when it commanded him to be cast into the lions’ den he submitted.

“A law which enjoins upon a citizen the commission of a 242crime, and still more of an open, disgraceful, and flagitious crime, has violated the confidence of the citizen, and is dissolved in the court of God the moment it is enacted.

“Let no man stand uncommitted, dodging between daylight and dark, on this vital principle. Let every man firmly and openly take sides. This vibrating between humanity for the fugitive and conscience for the law, this clandestine humanity in spite of law, to which the lips only give a sullen and pouting obedience, is not consistent with sincerity and open-hearted integrity. We adjure every Christian man, every man to whom conscience is more than meat, and honor better than thrift, to stand forth and enunciate the invincible truth of the Christian’s creed: Obedience to laws, even though they sin against me: disobedience to every law that commands me to sin.”

His conviction of the origin of this whole trouble, his policy concerning it, and his confidence in the working out of natural causes are well set forth in an article at this period upon “The Cause and Cure of Agitation”:

“It ought primarily to be understood that our Constitution has invited this whole conflict which has raged about it. Had the framers been gifted with prescience they would, we cannot but think, have regarded the inevitable future mischief of that compromise by which slavery had its rights embedded in a constitution of liberty, as too great to be risked. They acted with the light which they had. They swaddled and laid in one cradle two infant forms. These were rocked together and grew up together; but one was a wolf’s cub and the other a lamb. Both were alike peaceful at birth—for a lion’s whelp when first dropped is as gentle as a doe. Growth brought forth separate natures. Then appeared hostility. Each acted to its nature.

“Our policy for the future is plain. All the natural laws of God are warring upon slavery. We have only to let the process go on. Let slavery alone. Let it go to seed. Hold it to its own natural fruit. Cause it to abide by itself. Cut off every branch that hangs beyond the wall, every root that spreads. Shut it up to itself and let it alone. We do not ask to interfere with the internal policy of a single State by Congressional enactments: we will not ask to take one guarantee from the institution. We only ask that a line be drawn about it; that an insuperable bank be cast up; that it be fixed and for ever settled that slavery must 243find no new sources, new fields, new prerogatives, but that it must abide in its place, subject to all the legitimate changes which will be brought upon it by the spirit of a nation essentially democratic, by schools taught by enlightened men, by colleges sending annually into every profession thousands bred to justice and hating its reverse, by churches preaching a gospel that has always heralded civil liberty, by manufactories which always thrive best when the masses are free and refined and therefore have their wants multiplied, by free agriculture and free commerce.

“When slavery begins, under such a treatment, to flag, we demand that she be denied political favoritism to regain her loss; we demand that no laws be enacted to give health to her paralysis and strength to her relaxing grasp. She boldly and honestly demanded a right to equality with the North, and prophetically spoke by Calhoun, that the North would preponderate and crush her. It is true. Time is her enemy. Liberty will, if let alone, always be a match for oppression. Now, it is because statesmen propose stepping in between slavery and the appointed bourne to which she goes, scourged by God and nature, that we resent these statesmen and refuse to follow them. If her wounds can be stanched, if she may have adventitious aid in new privileges, slavery will renew her strength and stave off the final day. But if it be forbidden one additional favor and be obliged to stand up by the side of free labor, free schools, free churches, free institutions; if it be obliged to live in a land of free books, free papers, and free Bibles, it will either die or else it ought to live.”

He ridicules those measures that had been adopted North and South to enforce the peace, and compares those who keep agitating against agitation to poor old “crazy Dinah” who used to sit on the pulpit stairs in Litchfield. “Once she began talking, but, startled at her want of manners, she said out loud: ‘Why I’m talking! I’m talking in meetin’! There, I spoke again. I ought not to speak. There, I spoke once more. Tut, tut! why, I keep a-speaking.’”

While advocating at this time, as ever afterwards, the utmost liberty of discussion, he stated his creed in these words: “There is nothing so safe in a free country as free discussion, nothing so dangerous as the suppression of it; peace and liberty of speech, violence and intolerance, respectively go together.”

He argued and advised in a lengthy paper against “the usual 244unfortunate concomitants of controversy, bitterness, railing, unfairness, and exaggerated prejudices.

“We have not the least objection to the most unbounded ardor of expression, to the most enthusiastic convictions, expressed in the most positive manner, so long as they relate to truths or principles. But when the propagandist comes to regard those who do not receive his views as devoid of all principle and necessarily dishonest, and becomes offensively personal, then controversy is morbid and mischievous. And as nothing gives such vigor to like or dislike as conscience, so they who profess to be conscientious are often conscientiously bitter. There is no revulsion against men or measures so violent as that of pure and honorable men. A man consciously right should watch against severe judgments of others. It is sad and curious to observe the progress of exaggerated impressions of personal character. Those who do not follow our conscience on the slavery question are often, nevertheless, on the whole, more conscientious men than we. Those whose reasonings we pronounce cold and inhuman are not cold or inhuman men. Those whose commercial interests reduce them, as it seems to us, to a policy on this particular question which outrages justice and rectitude, are in their private character most estimable for truth, and even for tender sympathy. Indeed, this is often shown in strange contrast; for the very men who give their counsel and zeal and money against the unseen slave of the South irresistibly pity the particular fugitive whom they may see running through the North. They give the Union Committee money to catch the slave, and give the slave money to escape from the Committee.”

All who were acquainted with Mr. Beecher know that the course he advised for others he persistently and conscientiously pursued himself. We doubt if any man ever lived who was engaged in so many severe battles and carried into them or brought from them so little bitterness.

Such a vigorous treatment of large and vital questions commanded a following; and it was not long before this young minister from the West was recognized as one of the great anti-slavery leaders and had a national reputation. Men at the South began to hate him; men at the North, conservatives whose business interests were wrapped up in the present state of things, whose goods and principles were equally for sale in Southern markets, 245were horrified and alarmed at his unwise sayings, his blasphemous use of the pulpit for political ends, and his fiery denunciations of the nation’s pet institution. But over against these there was another class, daily growing larger, whose consciences were set free by his clear discrimination of a citizen’s and a Christian’s duty, whose intelligence was broadened and enlarged by his lofty views, and whose hearts were set on fire by his mighty enthusiasm and abounding love. This body daily increased in numbers and came more and more to share the spirit of their leader. Whatever he wrote they read. Whenever he spoke the size of church or hall alone decided the number of hearers. Without ambition, without self-seeking, with a simple, earnest desire to do his work as God revealed it to him, unrasped by hatreds, he had come to a place and leadership as broad and high as there was in the land. With cheek still ruddy with youth, with eyes from which the laughter never died out except when the tears of sympathy filled them or the deep things of God veiled them, with a heart that was in sympathy with all nature round him, and which nature and He who is above nature fed with perennial freshness, with a voice that could interpret every emotion, with that excellent health that makes the body a perfect channel of expression for the mind and a complete instrument for its service, he stands like a David just come from his sheepfolds, free, unencumbered, and singing as he strikes.

In the progress of this discussion upon the Compromise measures, which had its centre in Congress, but in which every hamlet, almost every household, in the North had a share, other questions came to the front as parts of the great controversy.

Among the earliest of these was the right of free speech—a right utterly unknown where slavery was in power, and always bitterly attacked where it had influence. As may well be expected, it found in Mr. Beecher one of its most strenuous champions. Early in his career he urged all the claims of friendship, risked the safety of his new church building, and defied the New York and Brooklyn mob, then under the control of the notorious Captain Rynders, in its defence.

In a sermon preached in 1884 upon the death of Wendell Phillips he gives an account of his experience in this matter:

“It is a part of the sweet and pleasant memories of my 246comparative youth here that when the mob refused to let him speak in the Broadway Tabernacle before it was moved up-town, William A. Hall, now dead—a fervent friend and Abolitionist—had secured the Graham Institute, on Washington Street, in Brooklyn, wherein to hold a meeting where Mr. Phillips should be heard. I had agreed to pray at the opening of the meeting. On the morning of the day on which it was to have taken place I was visited by the committee of that Institute (excellent gentlemen, whose feelings will not be hurt, because they are all now ashamed of it: they are in heaven), who said that, in consequence of the great peril that attended a meeting at the Institute, they had withdrawn the liberty to use it and paid back the money, and that they called simply to say that it was out of no disrespect to me, but from fidelity to their supposed trust. Well, it was a bitter thing. If there is anything on earth that I am sensitive to it is the withdrawing of the liberty of speech and thought. Henry C. Bowen said to me: ‘You can have Plymouth Church, if you want it.’ ‘How?’ ‘It is a rule of the church trustees that the church may be let by a majority vote when we are convened; but if we are not convened, then every trustee must give his consent in writing. If you choose to make it a personal matter and go to every trustee, you can have it.’ He meanwhile undertook, with Mr. Hall, to put new placards over the old ones, notifying men quietly that the meeting was to be held here, and distributing thousands and tens of thousands of hand-bills at the ferries. No task was ever more welcome. I went to the trustees man by man. The majority of them very cheerfully accorded the permission. One or two of them were disposed to decline and withhold it. I made it a matter of personal friendship: ‘You and I will break if you don’t give me this permission,’ and they signed. So the meeting glided from Graham Institute to this house. A great audience assembled. We had detectives in disguise, and every arrangement made to handle the subject in a practical form if the crowd should undertake to molest us.”

Neither at this nor any other time was an attack actually made upon Plymouth Church, although many times in its history have angry men gathered in the immediate neighborhood, evidently bent on mischief, but were restrained from violence by the bold bearing of many in the audience who were known not to be 247Quakers, and by the presence of the police, who were kept well informed of their intentions.

Another of the secondary battles that were fought early in this year was one for commercial liberty.

The South, by the help, and perhaps by the instigation, of Northern co-operators, attempted nothing less than to boycott every commercial or manufacturing company that was opposed to them upon the great political questions of the day. A great “Union Saving Committee” was formed in New York, and met in Castle Garden and made out a black-list of the merchants that were anti-slavery, from whom the South were to withdraw their patronage. Mr. Beecher not only preached against the outrage, but visited from store to store to uphold the courage of the merchants.

He says: “Mr. Bowen was, of course, included in that blacklist, and threatened with the loss of all his Southern custom. He came to me and asked me if I would not write a card for him, and I undertook to do it; but, my head not running very clear, the only thing I got at, after making three or four attempts, was, ‘My goods are for sale, but not my principles,’ but I could not lick it into shape, and I gave the paper to him and said, ‘You must fix it yourself.’ He took it to Hiram Barney, and he drew up the card in the shape in which it appeared, including that sentence, which was the snap of the whole thing.”

“My goods are for sale, but not my principles” became a war-cry for the independent business men of the day, and had immense influence upon commercial action.

He fought the petty ostracism of the North, and apparently with success:

“I never preached on that subject. I never said to the people in this congregation, from the beginning to this day, ‘You ought to let colored folks sit in your pew.’ I preached the dignity of man as a child of God, and lifted up the sanctity of human life and nature before the people. They made the application, and they made it wisely and well.

“When I came here there was no place for colored men and women in the theatre except the negro pen; no place in the opera; no place in the church except the negro pew; no place in any lecture-hall; no place in the first-class car on the railways. The white omnibus of Fulton Ferry would not allow colored persons 248to ride in it. They were never allowed to sit even in the gentlemen’s cabin on the boats.

“I invited Fred Douglass, one day in those times, to come to church here. ‘I should be glad to, sir,’ said he; ‘but it would be so offensive to your congregation.’ ‘Mr. Douglass, will you come? And if any man objects to it, come up and sit on my platform by me. You will always be welcome there.”

“At the Fulton Ferry there are two lines of omnibuses, one white and the other blue. I had been accustomed to go in them indifferently; but one day I saw a little paper stuck upon one of them, saying: ‘Colored people not allowed to ride in this omnibus.’ I instantly got out. There are men who stand at the door of these omnibus lines, urging passengers into one or the other. I am very well known to all of them; and the next day, when I came to the place, the gentleman serving asked: ‘Won’t you ride, sir?’ ‘No,’ I said; ‘I am too much of a negro to ride in that omnibus.’ I called the attention of every one I met to that fact, and said to them: ‘Don’t ride in that omnibus, which violates your principles, and my principles, and common decency at the same time.’ I do not know whether this had any influence, but I do know that after a fortnight’s time I had occasion to look in and the placard was gone.”

But perhaps the most important, at all events the hardest-fought, battle of this era was in behalf of the liberty of ministers of the Gospel to preach in their pulpits for the slave and against the atrocities of slavery.

It sprang from the publication, by an influential New York daily paper, of an article in which it was threatened that clergymen who spoke in their pulpits upon slavery “would have their coats rolled in the dirt.” Mr. Beecher at once took up the glove in his own defence and that of his brethren who thought it their duty to preach on this subject. He entered into an examination of the whole status of the slave with great thoroughness, and gathered his materials for defence and attack from Southern sources. A report made to the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia in 1833 says: “They have no Bible to read by their own firesides; they have no family altars; and when in affliction, sickness, or death, they have no minister to address to them the consolations of the Gospel.

“They are destitute of the privileges of the Gospel, and ever 249will be, under the present state of things. They may justly be considered the heathen of this country, and will bear a comparison with heathen in any country in the world.”

“Says Judge Ruffin, of North Carolina, in a case brought against defendant for shooting and wounding a woman who endeavored to run away from a whipping: ‘With slavery it is far otherwise. The end is the profit of the master, his security, and the public peace. The subject is one doomed in his own person and in his posterity to live without knowledge, and without capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that others may reap the fruits.’”

Aroused by such testimony from reports of religious bodies and the decisions of the courts, he exclaims, with hot indignation:

“Yet the pulpit, whose echoes roll over the heathenism of the globe, must be dumb!

“It is vain to tell us that hundreds of thousands of slaves are church-members; does that save women from the lust of their owners? does it save their children from being sold? does it save parents from separation? In the shameless processions every week made from the Atlantic to the Gulf are to be found slaves ordained to preach the Gospel, members of churches, baptized children, Sunday-school scholars carefully catechised, full of Gospel texts, fat and plump for market. What is religion worth to a slave, except as a consolation from despair when the hand that breaks to him the bread of communion on Sunday takes the price of his blood and bones on Monday, and bids him God-speed on his pilgrimage from old Virginia tobacco-fields to the cotton-plantations of Alabama?

“What is church fellowship, and church privilege, and church instruction worth if the recipient is still as much a beast, just as little loved, just as ruthlessly desolated of his family, just as coolly sold, as if he were without God and without hope? What motive is there to the slave to strive for Christian graces, when, if they make him a real man, they are threshed out of him; or, if they make him a more obedient and faithful man, raise his market price and only make him a more merchantable disciple of Christ? It is the religious phase of slave-life that reveals the darkest features of that all-perverting system.”

Ridiculing the idea that it takes distance to make a topic fit 250for the pulpit, and upbraiding the ministry, who are engaged in snatching here and there a child from the Ganges, and have no words for those children that, here at home, every year are snatched from the parents’ bosom and sold everywhither, he says:

“It requires distance, it seems, to make a topic right for the pulpit. Send it to Greenland or to Nootka Sound, and you may then practise at the far-away target. And the reason of such discrimination seems to be that preaching against foreign sins does not hurt the feelings nor disturb the quiet of your congregation; whereas, if the identical evils at home which we deplore upon the Indus or along the Burampootra are preached about, the Journal says that it will risk the minister’s place and bread and butter; and it plainly tells all Northern ministers that if they meddle with such politics they will have their coats rolled in the dirt. Will the Journal tell us how many leagues off a sin must be before it is prudent and safe for courageous ministers to preach against it?

“Every year thousands of women are lashed for obstinate virtue, and tens of thousands robbed of what they have never been taught to prize, and the Journal stands poised to cast its javelin at that meddlesome pulpit that dares speak of such boundless licentiousness, and send it to its more appropriate work of evangelizing the courtesans of Paris or the loose virtue of Italy! And it assures us that multitudes of clergymen are thanking it for such a noble stand. Some of those clergymen we know. The platforms of our benevolent societies resound with their voices, urging Christianity to go abroad, stimulating the Church not to leave a corner of the globe unsearched nor an evil unredressed. But when the speech is ended they steal in behind the Journal to give it thanks for its noble stand against the right of the pulpit to say a word about home-heathen—about their horrible ignorance, bottomless licentiousness, and about the mercenary inhumanity which every week is selling their own Christian brethren, baptized as much as they, often preachers of the Gospel like themselves, eating from the same table of the Lord, praying to the same Saviour, listening to snatches of that same Bible (whose letters they have never been permitted to learn), out of which these reverend endorsers of the Journal preach!”

He shows that the slavery of New England never was the 251slavery of the South: “The slavery of the South in our day adopts the Roman civil law as the basis of its code.... Now, New England never held a slave on the basis of the Roman civil law, but under a law which was expressly enacted for the benefit of the slave and for the ultimate destruction of slavery—viz., the Hebrew law of slavery. No system of slavery, in this land, can be profitable which does not put the slave under a regimen which denies him the rights of manhood. The North, on the basis of the Hebrew slavery law, found it out; she refused to go further and sacrifice her religious scruples. The South, on the basis of the Roman civil law, imbibed its inhuman spirit, put on the screws, and forced the system into its present legal attitude, with a written code more infamous than the unwritten law of any pirate’s deck.”

He proves that the North never sold out her slaves, with a profit, to “her partners in the South, and so closed up the business,” by showing that in most of the Northern States the slaves were set free by the decisions of the courts upon the adoption of the State constitutions, and that in the meantime their masters were forbidden, under heavy penalties, to sell them South.

In New York gradual emancipation was enacted, and not only was the sale of slaves out of the borders forbidden, but masters travelling with their slaves in the South were required to give heavy bonds for the safe return of the same.

These words reveal his own spirit in the discussion:

“In exploring this wilderness of inhumanity, filled with the shapes and motley sights of degradation, I live in a perpetual struggle how to calm the natural expressions of an honest soul into that measured phrase that may best suit the sated public ear. If one overhang this abyss until his spirit do drink in its very import, his soul must be full of thunder and his words glance like fire. Neither are these feelings the foul engenderings of fanaticism. They are the true feelings of a heart taught to hate injustice and degrading wrong, by that nature which God gave it; by the Bible which educated it; by the law under which it was made, and by the public sentiment in which it has been bred. It is with a sense of shame that we see strong words for oppression granted an unapologized liberty to walk up and down as they will; while he who speaks for freedom must rake up his ardor under the ashes of a tame propriety, and stand to answer for 252want of a Gospel spirit if indignation at double and treble wrongs do sometimes give forth a bolt! Nevertheless, we hope; we trust; we pray; and hoping, trusting, and praying, we soothe ourselves in such thoughts as these: ‘From this shame, too, thou shalt go forth, O world! God, who, unwearied sitting on the circle of the earth, hath beheld and heard the groanings and travailings of pain until now, and caused Time to destroy them one by one, shall ere long destroy thee, thou abhorred and thrice damnable oppression cancerously eating the breasts of liberty.’”

He concludes by giving his views upon the position of the pulpit, and utters this solemn protest:

“Therefore, against every line of the Coward’s Ethics of the Journal we solemnly protest, and declare a minister made to its pattern fitter to be sent to the pyramids and tombs of Egypt to preach to old-world mummies than to be a living man of God among living men, loving them but never fearing them! God be thanked that in every age hitherto pulpits have been found, the allies of suffering virtue, the champions of the oppressed! And if in this day, after the notable examples of heroic men in heroic ages, when life itself often paid for fidelity, the pulpit is to be mined and sapped by insincere friends and insidious enemies, and learn to mix the sordid prudence of business with the sonorous and thrice heroic counsels of Christ, then, O my soul, be not thou found conspiring with this league of iniquity; that so, when in that august day of retribution God shall deal punishment in flaming measures to all hireling and coward ministers, thou shalt not go down, under double-bolted thunders, lower than miscreant Sodom or thrice-polluted Gomorrah!”

Some idea of his mode of address and quickness in retort at that day will appear from extracts from his speech at the annual meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and two incidents that occurred at this meeting. Mr. Beecher answered the Scriptural argument for the return of fugitives, based on the return of Onesimus, in this manner: “There are two ways of sending fugitives back into slavery. One is the way Paul sent back the slave Onesimus. Now, if people will adopt that way I will not object. In the first place, he instructed him in Christianity and led him to become a Christian; then he wrote a 253letter and sent it by Onesimus himself. Now, I should like to see Marshal ——— or Marshal somebody else, of this city, send back a slave in this way. In the first place, the marshal would take him and teach him the catechism, and pray with him, and convert him, and then write a letter to his master telling him to receive him as a brother beloved; and then the slave goes of his own free will to his master, and walks into the house, and, with his broad, black, beaming face, says: ‘How d’ye do, my brother? and how d’ye do, my sister?’” The broad, beaming face which he himself wore as he described this scene and personated this character was irresistibly comical, and nothing more was heard in that quarter of Paul’s return of fugitives.

It was in this speech that, in describing the situation of the slave, he says:

“They are married and separated in the South until perhaps they have twenty wives.” [A voice: “There are men in New York City who have twenty wives.”] “I am sorry for them,” he answered at once. “I go for their immediate emancipation!”

He read extracts from the law as laid down by some of the able members of the Southern bench in South Carolina and Louisiana, to show that slaves are mere goods and chattels.

“The slave,” he exclaimed, “is made just good enough to be a good slave and no more. It is a penitentiary offence to teach him more.”

Here a person among a group in one corner of the gallery exclaimed: “It’s a lie!”

“Well, whether it’s a penitentiary offence or not, I shall not argue with the gentleman in the corner, as doubtless he has been there and ought to know.”

Such was the voice that began to attract attention throughout the whole land. It was as truthful and earnest as that of the old Abolitionists, but took in a broader range of subjects and was inspired by a higher spirit than theirs; it was as politic in its utterances as that of the prince of politicians, Martin Van Buren, but it was the policy of right and justice; it had in it the strength of Webster’s, but argued from truer premises than he; it was as popular as Henry Clay’s, but its sympathy was broader than his; it was the voice of Henry Ward Beecher as he stood in the early maturity of his powers, aflame with Christian love and patriotism, preaching the Gospel of the Son of God, the Deliverer 254and Saviour for slave and master, for North and South, for commerce and manufactures, for our whole land from shame and thraldom.

The need of such a voice will appear if we consider the state of things at this time, as he himself described it:

“‘An Abolitionist’ was enough to put the mark of Cain upon any young man that arose in my early day, and until I was forty years of age it was punishable to preach on the subject of liberty. It was enough to expel a man from church communion if he insisted on praying in the prayer-meeting for the liberation of the slaves. I am speaking the words of truth and soberness. The Church was dumb in the North, but not in the West. A marked distinction exists between the history of the New School of Presbyterian churches in the West and the Congregational churches, the Episcopal churches, the Methodist and Baptist churches in the North and East. The great publishing societies that were sustained by the contributions of the churches were absolutely dumb. Great controversies raged round about the doors of the Bible Society, of the Tract Society, and of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The managers of these societies resorted to every shift except that of sending the Gospel to the slaves. They would not send the Bible to the South; for, they said, ‘it is a punishable offence in most of the Southern States to teach a slave to read; and are we to go in the face of this State legislation and send the Bible South?’ The Tract Society said: ‘We are set up to preach the Gospel, not to meddle with political and industrial institutions.’ And so they went on printing tracts against tobacco and its uses, tracts against dancing and its abuses, and refusing to print a tract that had a shadow of criticism on slavery!

“One of the most disgraceful things took place under the jurisdiction of Bishop Doane, of New Jersey—I take it for granted, without his knowledge. I have the book. It was an edition of the Episcopal prayer-book. They had put into the front of it a steel engraving of Ary Scheffer’s ‘Christus Consolator’—Christ the Consoler. There was a semi-circle around about the beneficent and aerial figure of our Saviour—the poor, the old, the sick, the mother with her dead babe, bowed in grief; every known form of human sorrow belonged to the original design and picture, and among others a fettered slave, with his hands lifted to 255heaven, praying for liberty. But this was too much; and so they cut out the slave, and left the rest of the picture, and bound it into the Episcopal prayer-book of New Jersey. I have a copy of it, which I mean to leave to the Historical Society of Brooklyn when I am done using it.

“These things are important as showing the incredible condition of public sentiment at that time. If a man came to be known as an anti-slavery man it almost preluded bankruptcy in business.”

After the intense excitement, within and without Congress, upon the discussion and the passage of the Compromise measures of 1850, a reaction followed, and the year 1851 is, in many respects, a marked contrast to that immediately preceding. The people, in the main, tired of the discussion and the consequent turmoil, thankful for their escape, as they thought, from the threatened danger of the dissolution of the Union, were determined to preserve the peace that had been won, and frowned upon everything that endangered its continuance. Public meetings and conventions, held for the expression of free-State sentiments, were regarded with great disfavor and often broken up by mob violence.

Four millions of people in a Christian land were denied every right belonging to them, not only on the ground of Christianity but of humanity, and yet they must be dumb. The pulpit, which represented Him who came to set the captive free and preach the Gospel to the poor, on this great matter must utter no voice. Statesmanship must see consummated an utter perversion of the fundamental principles and policy of the nation, and yet offer no protest. A common humanity, outraged by the atrocities committed against a fellow human being, must be silent or join in the hue and cry for the capture of the unhappy victim.

This was the programme that conservatism, through the press, in the pulpit, by the ballot-box, through business patronage, social frowns or favors, and not unfrequently through mob violence, attempted to execute. It was as vain as to try to still the voice of Niagara or the noise of the breakers upon the coast.

One thing more powerful than any other contributed to prevent a complete reaction and consequent stagnation upon this subject—the activity of the South in availing itself of the advantages offered by the Fugitive Slave Bill for obtaining possession 256of the property that had escaped and was living on Northern soil. The year 1851 was emphatically a year of slave-hunting. And since these refugees from labor had, many of them, lived for years at the North, had become respectable citizens and reared families, their violent capture invariably occasioned, if not forceful resistance, at least deep and bitter indignation.

The quiet of 1851 was not perfect and it could not be made permanent. It was only the lull which weariness compels in every hard-fought battle.

In December of this year Kossuth visited this country at the invitation of the Senate, coming in a government steamer sent to Asia especially for his conveyance. Many things contributed to awaken immense enthusiasm for him. He had represented Hungary in the Austrian Diet; had championed the liberty of free press and free speech so fearlessly as to gain the honor of an Austrian dungeon; had been elected governor of Hungary, and for two years had waged successful war with Austria. Overcome by the immense military power of that great empire in alliance with Russia, he had been forced into exile with a price set upon his head. He represented, in that year of European revolutions, the struggles of the common people for liberty. These experiences, united with his personal appearance and marvellous eloquence, combined to secure for him a most enthusiastic reception by the people of this country. The Senate, on the other hand, were far more chary of their welcome. The Hungarian exile stood for universal liberty, and that was just what at that time the Senate of the United States were most interested in suppressing. However, though granted no reception, a banquet was given in his honor, at which most of our public men were present, and Daniel Webster, Secretary of State, delivered the principal address.

Quick to perceive the dilemma in which Congress found itself, and eager that the nation at large should appreciate it, Mr. Beecher writes a Star Paper in which, in his usual happy and effective style, he describes the incongruity in the action of our government in welcoming this fugitive from the oppression of the Old World while we are engaged in remanding to their oppressors fugitives in the New.

Invited by Mr. Beecher, Kossuth delivered an address in Plymouth Church in behalf of the cause of Hungarian liberty. 257So great was the eagerness of the people to hear him that some ten thousand dollars were realized from the sale of tickets.

So did the pastor of this church link himself with the cause of freedom all over the earth.

Fifty-two, being “election year,” saw efforts more persistent, if possible, than ever before to regard the Compromise measures as a finality and discourage all agitation of the subject of slavery. A public pledge was signed by more than fifty senators, among them the most influential from both the great parties, including Henry Clay, agreeing that they would thereafter support no candidate who did not approve and promise to abide by the provisions of that compact. Both the great parties of the day—the Whig and Democratic—put into their platforms resolutions declaring that the above Compromise was accepted as a final settlement of the questions at issue, and agreed to resist all attempts at renewing the agitation of the slavery question under any pretext whatsoever. In the election Franklin Pierce, who had but two qualifications for the office of chief magistrate—he was a gentleman and a radical pro-slavery man—was chosen by an overwhelming majority for President, for the reason that his party affiliations gave the best assurance that the pledges which all had alike made would in his case be fulfilled.

General Scott and the Whig party made just as profound an obeisance to the slave-power, and offered just as heavy a bid for its favors; but there was not the same confidence in their ability to perform the service demanded as in that of their Democratic rivals, and they were in consequence disastrously defeated. So did the popular vote upon its first opportunity endorse the action of Congress and declare that discussion on this great matter was closed. Yet, in spite of the verdict of the ballot-box, in spite of resolutions, compacts, and threats, agitation still went on. Mr. Beecher explains the phenomenon:

“Politicians inquire whence is the tenacity of life of the anti-slavery movement. It is not fanaticism that animates or controls it, it is the religious principle that is the secret of the strength of this cause; it is because Jesus Christ is alive, and there are Jesus Christ men who count this cause dearer than their lives.”

In the summer and autumn of 1852 Mr. Beecher was engaged in what was called “The Parker Controversy.”

258We have no desire to open anew the bitterness of those old matters which have passed so long ago into history, and almost into forgetfulness, but no biography of the man would be complete without a reference to this trial, the severest which he had thus far endured, and which prepared him for other and greater ones to come. In our study of the character and disposition of Henry Ward Beecher we find him, as we believe, to have been pre-eminently a man of peace. In his history we see him almost continuously engaged in war. This anomaly is easily explained. It was not from desire or disposition, but a necessary consequence of the progress which he was making and the position which he occupied. The age was moving forward: wrongs must be overcome, new positions of advantage must be gained. By the habit of his mind, the intuitions of his genius, and the earnestness and simplicity of his purpose he found himself a leader in this progress.

While others stopped to discover the truth by laborious study in their libraries, he found it among the results of former researches, derived it intuitively from well-admitted principles, or gathered it from the people with whom he associated by the way. While others were carefully weighing the consequences of their actions, he, trusting in God, in the righteousness of his cause, in the forces of nature and in himself, stepped forward to the front. While others were laboriously forging their speeches his sprang like the fabled Minerva from the brain of Jupiter, alive, armed, and beautiful. He came into battle for the same reason that the head of a column advancing to seize a favorable position within the enemy’s lines is early brought under fire, or that a heavy field-battery, which is sending its shot with deadly effect into the ranks of the enemy, is attacked.

In his discussion with a New York daily, of which we have already spoken, he had come in conflict with the commercial spirit of the day which held its principles and its goods both for sale, and against it had defended the right of the pulpit to discuss the live topics of the hour. This had drawn fire. Men who had been scored as he scored them in a Star Paper of January 24, 1850, entitled “A Man in the Market”— “... They hang themselves up in the shambles of every Southern market; they trust the pliant good nature of the North, and are only fearful lest they should fail to be mean enough to please the South”—and 259who deserved the scoring, would not be likely to forget it soon or forgive it readily. The conflict in which he now became engaged was more painful than the former, for it was waged with Christian brethren. Beginning as a skirmish, it became a general battle, in which the conservatism of the Church, which had expurgated its religious tracts, curbed the religious press, and toned down the utterances of the pulpit, so as not to hurt the feelings of slave-holders, was engaged and brought to judgment.

It came about in this way: In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Mrs. Stowe had described the sale of a child taken from the arms of the mother, and of Tom’s feeling on the subject. “To him it looked like something unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he had not learned to generalize and take in large views. If he had only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity he might have thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful trade—a trade which is the vital support of an institution which some American divines tell us has no evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life.”

In a note she refers to Dr. Joel Parker by name as the man who had given utterance to these sentiments, and as representing the class which entertained them. The words, “No evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life,” had been printed as his in a discussion which he had held in Philadelphia, had gone the rounds of the papers as his and had been printed and commented upon in England, and he had never denied that they rightfully belonged to him. But the quickened moral feeling which followed the publication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” made the authorship of such sentiments less pleasant than formerly, and Dr. Parker suddenly discovered that he had been wronged in having these words ascribed to him, and threatened Mrs. Stowe with a suit for libel. A friend of his lawyer visited her brother Henry, and suggested that this matter could be arranged without a law-suit. With a confidence that was born of sincerity and inexperience, the brother attempts that most difficult rôle—that of peace-maker. He visits Dr. Parker, becomes satisfied that his language is capable of a less violent construction than had been put upon it, confers with Mrs. Stowe and finds her ready to take the most favorable view of the case possible, bears a letter from 260her to the doctor, writes and discusses with him the answer which he shall make, forwards Mrs. Stowe’s letter, which had been somewhat changed in the discussion, to her for approval—which being gained, he publishes both letters over the united signatures of the two parties, and goes off to Indiana on a lecturing trip, with the happy consciousness that he has done a good thing. Never was a man waked from a sweeter dream to a more bitter disappointment. Instead of making peace between them, he found, as a result of his labors, their differences increased and embittered, and himself charged with forgery both of letter and signature. Offended professional pride, newspaper rivalry, the hatred of men who had been lashed by his tongue and pen, the fears of conservatives and the bitter hatred of pro-slavery men, suddenly united their forces for his destruction. This young radical had left himself open to attack, and they all rushed to the onset or stood back and cheered others on, and were already beginning to rejoice in his downfall. The lead in the attack soon passed out of the doctor’s hands into those of more able and less scrupulous men, and aimed at nothing less than his annihilation. “The arrow was well shot,” he said; “had I been unshielded it would have done its work, for the point was poisoned.” But he was not unshielded! the overthrow was not accomplished, and he stood, at the end, fully vindicated from all the aspersions of his enemies.

In a long, carefully written article over his own name he gives the whole beginning, continuance, and end of this unhappy matter:

“For myself I profess that no event of my life, not the loss of my own children nor bereavements of friends most dear, have ever filled me with so deep a sorrow as that which I have in being made a party to a public dispute when three of the parties concerned are ministers of the Gospel, and when the fourth is a woman and the wife of a clergyman. At the very best it is a shame and a disgrace. To avert it I labored most honestly and with all my might.”

He closes with these words:

261Two letters selected from the voluminous correspondence of that time, one to a friend who approved, and the other to one who condemned, his course, are given, that the spirit which he cherished may be more thoroughly understood:

Also we give extracts from a third:

We find no word from Mr. Beecher concerning the election of this year, but an article immediately following shows that he kept his eye upon the main issue, and that none of its humorous any more than its sorrowful features escaped him. It was entitled “Degraded into Liberty”:

“A Southern gentleman en route for Texas brought to New York eight slaves, to be shipped hence by one of our ocean-going steamers. The birds of the air informed the Abolitionists of the facts, and it was not long before a writ was served upon the whole chattel-gang, and they were hauled up before Judge Paine to show cause why they should not be doomed to freedom. The cruel inhospitality of New York was never more manifest. These innocent fellow-beings, blessed by being born slaves, and not painfully educated for it, as Northern Southerners are; having had all the manifold mercies which make a Virginia slave so much better off than a free factory-girl in Massachusetts; having grown up in the indulgence of those hilarious dances and in the practice of those songs which make plantation life perfectly paradisaical, they were on their way to that land waving with sugar-cane and cotton-plants, where, hoe in hand, they were to while away the brilliant hours with gentle dalliances with loam and clay—when lo! they were suddenly arrested.

“From these bright anticipations they have been ruthlessly snatched, and plunged into freedom utterly unprepared! Are there no tears in Castle Garden? Ought not the Union Committee to spend something for a trifle of crape? Eight innocent fellow-chattels changed into fellow-beings! No kind master have they now. The tender relation is sundered. Our bereaved 264master and mistress must depart slaveless and alone. Having been worked for so long, and tended and taken care of, it is doubtful whether they will be able to take care of themselves now. Much as we sympathize with them, we do not consider their affliction at all comparable to that of the late happy slaves. These poor creatures are free, and we are assured in the highest quarter that no greater evil than that can well befall the slave population. They have degraded themselves. They have refused to be ‘content rather.’ In all the world they cannot find a man who owns them. They are now to sneak through life, like white men, owning themselves! They must have had some awful moments of compunction when the conviction first flashed upon them that they owned their own hands, trod upon their own feet, put their clothes upon their own shoulders, and felt that thing throbbing under their ribs to be their own heart. Some natural feelings must have shot through the maternal heart as she pressed her own babe to her own breast, and dropped her own tears upon its dusky cheek....

“Only one woman can be found faithful in this emergency. Their former mistress alone has appealed to their conscience and adjured them to return to her! Where were the teachers, the chaplains, the casuists, the lawyers, that a little time ago choked the press with beatitudes of slavery? ‘His watchmen are blind; they are all ignorant; they are all dumb dogs; they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.’

“In reply to Mrs. Lemmon’s appeal the deluded slave-woman drew herself up, and, pressing her child to her breast, said, ‘I had rather be free!’ What! not value the radiant mercies of slavery more than that? The creature is crazy! Slaves in their senses are always contented. They are mere pets. The Uncle Toms of Virginia do nothing but look after the children, or sit in sunny nooks and smoke their stubbed pipes. The Aunt Phillises are always fat, rollicking cooks, bursting with laughter. Nobody is happy but slaves. The poor masters have all the care and burden, slaves all the glee and leisure....

“It is a dreadful state of things here in New York, where we feed upon Cotton, and have our very living in the smiles and favor of the South, to be hurting their feelings by talking so much about liberty and all that. A few more slaves set free, and the South will get angry again; and then New York will 265be in a world of trouble, and another call will call together another Castle Garden full of anxious merchants, all full of love to the South; and we shall have more sermons and more newspaper articles; and nobody can tell what will happen the next time.

“In part, the South is at fault. It has sent North the wrong kind of negroes. Those who have run away, or been judicially sentenced to freedom, or been bought—all these have loved liberty. Now, won’t the South send us some of another sort—some of those model slaves that love bondage and wouldn’t take liberty if they could get it? With a few specimen copies of such, we believe that we could do Southern institutions great good in the North.      *”

Fifty-three follows in much the same line as that of the two years immediately preceding. Franklin Pierce, who had been elected in November last, takes the oath of office on the 4th of March. His inaugural gives expression to what was undoubtedly the general feeling of the country—a determination that the Compromise measures shall be enforced, and a fervent trust that the question of slavery has been settled; and in his annual message, upon the assembling of Congress in that year, promises that the peace which now so happily existed through the land should not be disturbed during his term of office, if he could prevent it. A large majority of the people, both North and South, were undoubtedly in perfect accord with this desire, greatly pleased with this assurance, and tried to share his confidence.

Those were days in which a great deal of sympathy was felt in this country for the Irish, and by many, too, who were stanch opposers of liberty for the negro. Mr. Beecher had no patience with men, on either side of the Atlantic, whose sympathy was limited by the bounds of race or color; and when John Mitchel, who had posed as the “Great Irish Patriot” of that day, having escaped from an English penal colony and been received here with great enthusiasm, took occasion to state in an editorial in the Citizen, “We deny that it is a crime or a wrong, or even a peccadillo, to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to sell slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging or other needful coercion; we only wish we had a good plantation well stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama,” he (Mr. Beecher) enters into public correspondence with him, in which he denies the claims of the refugee 266to be an “apostle of liberty,” sorrows over his downfall, and dismisses him to the test of history in these words:

“Once you stood like some great oak whose wide circumference was lifted up above all the pastures, the glory of all beholders, and a covert for a thousand timid singing-birds! Now you lie at full length along the ground, with mighty ruptured roots ragged and upturned to heaven, with broken boughs and despoiled leaves! Never again shall husbandman predict spring from your swelling buds! Never again shall God’s singing-birds of liberty come down through all the heavenly air to rest themselves on your waving top! Fallen! Uprooted! Doomed to the axe and the hearth!

“But there is a future beyond this, even on earth! There is a time promised, and already dawning, in which the human family shall be one great brotherhood, and Love shall be the law of man! In that golden age there shall be research made for all the names that, since the world began, have wrought and suffered for the good of their kind. There will be a memorable resurrection of forgotten names. From the obscurity into which despotism has flung all who dared to defy it, from the shades and darkness of oblivion by which oppressors would cover down the memory of all who proclaimed human right and human liberty, they will come forth shining like the sun, and none be forgotten that labored to bring to pass the world’s freedom! In that day, when ten thousand names shall be heard, in all their number not one shall utter that gone and forgotten name—John Mitchel!”

We do not wish it to be inferred from our words that Mr. Beecher was the only anti-slavery leader who was doing good service in those days. There were many others, and some, perhaps, were doing as effective work in a single line as he. But we believe that, when the whole sphere of his activity was considered, he went far beyond any man of his time.

In any one of the three channels of largest influence, of that or of any time—the pulpit, the press, and the platform—he was the peer, if not the superior, of any leader; and while the most of his co-laborers used but one, or at the most two, of these instrumentalities, he was constantly employing the three, and each with unequalled efficiency.

His beliefs, as his labors, were broader than the most who 267were at that day prominently identified with the anti-slavery cause. He believed in the Constitution of the United States, and claimed that, if the government should be administered according to the original intent of this document, slavery must speedily cease. In this he differed from Garrison and his school, who held that “the (Federal) Constitution is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” He believed in the ballot-box, and in using its power to the utmost. In this he differed from Wendell Phillips and others of his school, who had disfranchised themselves for years, lest by voting they should seem to countenance an institution that was being used for the perpetuity of so great an injustice. He believed in the Church and the moral forces which she could bring to the work. He believed in love rather than hate, and most of all, with a triumphant, joyful faith, he believed in the person, presence, and leadership of the Redeemer and Reformer of the world. In all this he separated from the great body, individuals here and there excepted, of the Garrison and Pillsbury school of Abolitionists.

His judgment of the spirit of the leaders in this great movement may be inferred from the following extracts:

“Events made Garrison a leader. We never thought, and we do not now think, that Garrison deserved the one-half of the bitter reproaches that have been heaped upon him. His worst faults have been the reaction, in him, of the opposite faults of men favoring slavery or indifferent to it. But we regard him as one of the most unfortunate of all leaders for the best development of anti-slavery feeling. He is a man of no mean ability, of indefatigable industry, of the most unbounded enterprise and eagerness, of perseverance which pushes him like a law of nature, and of courage which amounts to recklessness. These are the qualifications which make a man powerful for stimulation. Had he possessed, as a balance to these, conciliation, good-natured benevolence, or even a certain popular mirthfulness; had he possessed the moderation and urbanity of Clarkson, or the deep piety of Wilberforce, he had been the one man of our age. These all he lacked. Had the disease of America needed only counter-irritation, no better blister could have been applied.

“Garrison did not create the anti-slavery spirit of the North. He was the offspring of it. It existed before he was born. But he at one time more powerfully developed and organized it than 268any other one mind; and developed it in modes and spirit, as we think, most unfortunate. Anti-slavery under his influence was all teeth and claw. It fought. It never conciliated. It gained not one step by kindness. It won not a single fort by surrender. It bombarded everything it met, and stormed every place which it won. We do not deny that Garrison and his early followers did a great work. Another generation will divide praise and blame, as no one is fitted to do in the heats of the present day. But when bare justice shall be done we believe that it will be found that a noble soul, deeply and truly benevolent, who sought the truest interests of his age, yet sought them with such a fierceness and such a hard and relentless courage as constantly roused up in his path the worst feelings of man, and heaped obstacles before him to such a degree that at length, in combating them, his sympathies for good seemed swallowed up in a bitter hatred of evil. The result of the agitation, inspired largely with this feeling, was that almost every interest in the nation rose up against the movement with which he was identified. Churches dreaded abolitionism, parties hated abolitionism, commerce abhorred abolitionism. Mobs rioted around the meetings, and threatened the dwellings, the stores, and the very persons of Abolitionists.

“There was odium and influence enough arrayed against the anti-slavery movement, under the form of early abolitionism, to have sunk ten enterprises which depended on men for existence. But there was a spirit in this cause, there was a secret strength, which nerved it, and it lived right on, and grew, and trampled down opposition, and came forth victorious! There was an irresistibility in it which made it superior to the faults of its friends and the deadly hatred of its enemies.”

It will be seen from the above how thoroughly he differed from what may be called the right wing of the Abolition party.

This difference is emphasized and the spirit which impelled him is indicated in an address which he delivered before the annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, and in a letter which he wrote to the New York Tribune in answer to a criticism that appeared in that paper:

“I believe there is to be found Christianity enough in the world, in the Church and out of it, in the Bible and out of it, i.e., in the record and in the living heart, and, I had almost said, 269breathed through the very air, as a Divine Providence, inspiring the great organic laws of society, controlling the moral sense of the Church, yea, beating in the veins of political economy, subtly guiding the common generosities of men into a public sentiment which, in God’s own time, in spite of recreant clergymen, apostate statesmen, venal politicians, and trafficking shopmen, shall fall upon this vast and unmitigated abomination and utterly crush it. But my earnest desire is that slavery may be destroyed by the manifest power of Christianity. If it were given me to choose whether it should be destroyed in fifty years by selfish commercial influences, or, standing for seventy-five years, be then the spirit and trophy of Christ, I had rather let it linger twenty-five years more, that God may be honored, and not mammon, in the destruction of it. So do I hate it that I should rejoice in its extinction, even did the devil tread it out, as he first kindled it; but how much rather would I see God Almighty come down to shake the earth with His tread, to tread all tyrannies and oppressions small as the dust of the highway, and to take unto Himself the glory!”

This having been severely criticised, especially his willingness to have slavery linger, if by so doing its destruction could become a trophy to the prevailing power of Christ, he replies in a letter addressed to the same journal:

“Our highest and strongest reason for seeking justice among men is not the benefit to men themselves, exceedingly strong as that motive is and ought to be. We do not join the movement party of our times simply because we are inspired by an inward and constitutional benevolence. We are conscious of both these motives and of many other collateral ones; but we are earnestly conscious of another feeling stronger than either, that lives unimpaired when these faint, yea, that gives vigor and persistence to these feelings when they are discouraged; and that is a strong personal, enthusiastic love for Christ Jesus. I regard the movement of the world toward justice and rectitude to be of His inspirations. I believe my own aspirations, having a base in my natural faculties, to be influenced and directed by Christ’s Spirit. The mingled affection and adoration which I feel for Him is the strongest feeling that I know. Whether I will or not, whether it be a phantasy or a sober sentiment, the fact is the same nevertheless, that that which will give pleasure to Christ’s heart and bring 270to my consciousness a smile of gladness on His face in behalf of my endeavor, is incalculably more to me than any other motive. I would work for the slave for his own sake, but I am sure that I would work ten times as earnestly for the slave for Christ’s sake.

“I am not ashamed to own that I bear about with me an ineffaceable consciousness that I am what I am from Christ’s influence upon me. I accept the power to do good as His inspiration. Life is sacred to me only by my belief that I am walking in the scenes of a personal Divine Providence. When I drop from these beliefs life becomes void, the events of human society mere bubbles, and strifes of hope and fear, of good and bad, are useless as the turmoil of the rapids above Niagara. Nay, there is more than this: there is a heart-swell which no words can express; there is a sense of the sweet freedom of love, a sense of gracious pity, of patient condescension, of entire and transcendent excellence in Christ, which makes me feel how utterly true was the impassionate language of David: ‘Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire besides Thee. My heart and my flesh cry out for God!’...

“This sentiment does not spring from any indifference to the slave, but from a yet greater sympathy with Christ Jesus—the slave’s only hope, my only hope, the Saviour of the world!”

With this letter we close our consideration of Mr. Beecher’s work in this era of slavery agitation. Great as were his labors—and we think they were unsurpassed and unequalled by those of any other man—we still believe that his best contribution to the great cause was the spirit which he manifested and the motives that influenced him. It was like the walking of the Hebrew youths in the fiery furnace and coming forth unscathed from the flames.

The Battle Renewed—Repeal of the Missouri Compromise Proposed—The Struggle in Congress—Mr. Beecher’s Appeals—The Battle lost in Congress is Transferred to the Territories—Forces Engaged—Kansas War—Dred Scott Decision—Mr. Beecher’s Defence of Kansas—“Beecher’s Bibles”—Charles Sumner Attacked in the Senate—The Fremont Campaign—The Dog Noble.

“Henry, the battle is coming on. When it will end I know not. I only hope that every one feels as alert as I do” (extract from a letter of Mrs. Stowe to Henry Ward Beecher). It was dated November 1, 1852, but expresses the feeling of some of the more sagacious ones during the whole of this era of apparent peace. They were not deceived by the surface calm. They felt that, beneath all party platforms, and the compromises of party politics, and the make-shifts of a commercial spirit, the great conscience of the North was being stirred. Deep was calling unto deep, and the moanings of the sea that presaged the coming tempest had reached their ears. The storm, not a new one but the violent rising of the same old elements, began in Congress in the early part of 1854, upon the question of the organization of the territory of “The Platte,” afterwards divided into two Territories called “Kansas and Nebraska.” The star of empire was moving Westward, but of what kind should this empire be, of liberty or slavery? If matters continued as they then were it must be the former. California, stretching along the Pacific coast for two hundred and fifty miles below Mason and Dixon’s line, had declared for freedom through all her borders. The Territories of New Mexico and Utah were not favorable to any great growth of slavery nor capable of rendering it much assistance. Texas, although intensely pro-slavery, yet, by reason of State pride, would not divide her imperial domain into quarters for the benefit of that institution. Only in one direction was expansion and growth possible, and that was in this broad domain which was now asking to be organized into Territories and would soon demand admission as States. 272Why should not this magnificent country be opened to the slave-owner and his property as well as to the settler from the North? Was not this his right? Other factors than property interests have entered into the question. Conscience has been enlisted upon the one side as on the other. The South has come to look upon slavery as having equal rights, under the Constitution, with liberty, and she feels aggrieved that she is not given all the privileges of her fellow-citizens of the North. The only thing that apparently prevented this natural and, as it seemed to her, just expansion, was the Missouri Compromise, which had solemnly guaranteed this whole territory to freedom. Why not repeal this obnoxious measure? The proposition to do this sprang from Kentucky. The same State which, through its senator. Henry Clay, had been foremost in originally securing the act, now through its senator, Mr. Dixon, his successor, was the first to ask for its repeal. Unlike as the movement seems, and disowned as it undoubtedly would have been by Mr. Clay, the great projector of the Missouri Compromise, yet in reality the substance of each is the same. In both there is but one design—to placate the slave-power and save the country by attempting to compromise, not diverse interests, but antagonistic principles. They were but separate steps in one path, and that a road towards national perversion, disgrace, and ruin. The guiding star which once shone in the heavens had been lost, and our statesmen were taking up with a will-o’-the-wisp, born of swamp and miasma, in its place.

Although the project was conceived by the South, it could not have been brought to the birth, much less nourished into baneful strength, had it not been adopted by the North in the person of Stephen A. Douglas, one of the ablest leaders of the Democratic party, a member of the United States Senate, and chairman of the Committee upon Territories. Into the bill for organizing the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which he reported to the Senate in January of 1854, he introduced the proposition to repeal the old Missouri Compromise. The mere proposal was regarded as little less than sacrilege. For thirty years that compromise had been looked upon as a sacred pledge, to be held in the same reverence as the Constitution itself. Scarcely four years before, the mover of the proposition for its repeal had described it as “canonized in the hearts of the American 273people as a sacred thing which no ruthless hand would ever be reckless enough to disturb.” An attempt to set it aside roused the most intense excitement throughout the whole land, the South in favor, the North opposed. The readiness with which the flame sprang up proved that through these past years of apparent quiet the fire had been covered but not put out. Now that fresh fuel was added and the draught opened, it blazed up more fiercely than ever. It was not confined to any class or condition.

All of anti-slavery tendencies saw in it an evidence of the settled purpose of the South to nationalize the institution of slavery, and a testimony that it would not scruple to use any means to attain its end.

Moralists saw in it a disregard of most sacred promises, and felt the ground of constitutional fidelity shaking under their feet. More than three thousand clergymen in New England signed a protest against the action proposed.

“We protest against the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as a great moral wrong; as a breach of faith, eminently unjust to the moral principles of the community and subversive of all confidence in national engagements; as a measure full of danger to the peace and even the existence of our beloved Union, and exposing us to the righteous judgments of the Almighty.”

Even the mere politician was angry that an issue so repugnant to a majority of the people had been so unwisely precipitated. Nor were his anger and apprehension unwarranted. The storm of popular indignation swept down like a tempest upon the forests, scattering dead leaves, breaking off dead branches, and throwing down trees that had become rotten in trunk or root. Before the end of the year the Democratic party had lost its magnificent majority in Congress, and the Whig party had practically ceased to exist, dishevelled, torn up by the roots, buried by the storm.

During this preliminary contest Mr. Beecher is neither indifferent nor silent. In lectures, in special sermons, and in numerous Star Papers he makes his influence felt. In one of the latter upon “The Crisis” his appeals and reproaches go out to all classes:

“The virtue, the morals, the prosperity of a domain large enough to be an empire has no safeguard about it. Those future States, silent and unpopulous, are like so many lambs huddled 274in a thicket by crowds of wolves, that only wait for some single taste of blood to plunge in and tear the whole! Unless there is a storm from the people that shall roll like thunder in the mountains; unless the recreant and graceless herd in Congress shall hear the coming down of many waters, like roaring freshets from mountains on whose tops clouds have burst, there will soon be no more ground to fight for. If anything is to be done it must be done by the North. It must be quickly, loudly, and impetuously done! There must be an outcry coming up from the bosom of the people, like that which rent the midnight of Egypt when all its first-born were stricken. Let no man wait for his fellow. Let children and women lead and teach sluggish manhood with what energy and soul a voice should be heard for liberty, upon half a continent, like the voice of God when He speaks in storms!

“Let every single man write, ‘I solemnly protest against the perfidy and the outrage of abolishing the Missouri Compromise’; and as he bears it to the post-office, if he find a fellow to sign it, let him sign; but if not, let it go as his single protest.

“Let families send solemn protests—the father and mother, the children and hired laborers. Let there be ten thousand petitions from single families within a week at Washington.

“Let churches and congregations unite and send instant petitions.

“In this solemn hour of peril, when all men’s hearts sink within them, we have an appeal to those citizens who rebuked us for our fears in 1850.

“Did you not declare that that should be a finality? Did you not say that, by a concession of conscience, we should thereafter have peace?

“Is this the peace? Is this the fulfilment of your promise? Is not this the very sequence which we told you would come? That compromise was a ball of frozen rattlesnakes. You turned them in your hands then with impunity. We warned and besought. We protested and adjured. You persisted in bringing them into the dwelling. You laid them down before the fire. Now where are they? They are crawling all around. Their fangs are striking death into every precious interest of liberty! It is your work!

“In this emergency where are those ministers of the Gospel 275who have always refused to infuse into the public mind a sound and instructed moral sentiment upon the subject of slavery? Hitherto you have been silent, because it did not concern the North. We earnestly protested that so deep and dreadful a disease could not prey upon any limb of this nation and not strike its taint and danger through and through the whole body politic. We implored men not to let the first principles of human rights die out of the popular mind; not to let a gigantic engine of despotism, through its selfish remunerations of commerce, deaden every quick sensibility to justice and bribe to sleep the vigilance of humanity, though every palm should have thrice as many pieces of silver as did he of old.

“The North is both bound and asleep. It is bound with bonds of unlawful compromise! You, ministers of Christ, held her limbs, while the gaunt and worthy minions of oppression moved about, twisting inextricable cords about her hands and feet; or, like Saul, stood by, holding the garments of those that slew the martyr! The poor Northern conscience has been like a fly upon a spider’s web. Her statesmen, and not a few of her ministers, have rolled up the struggling insect, singing fainter and fainter, with webs of sophistry, till it now lies a miserable, helpless victim, and Slavery is crawling up to suck its vital blood!

“What, then, do you owe to God, to heaven, and to your country, in an effort to regain conscience, liberty, and duty? God, who searches the heart, knows that it is not in our heart to say these things for the sake of aspersion. We would lie down before you, and let your steps tread our very neck, if you were only marching toward the high ends of our country’s good. But we cannot endure to see noble and venerable ministers of the Gospel first duped and deceived, and made to serve the ends of oppression, and then, when the mighty juggle is detected, stand silent and aghast, as unwilling now to repair as before to prevent the utter misery and evil.

“But let us not be deceived. Let every man be prepared for a future! If this bill shall be defeated the North will be like a man just dragged out of the rapids above Niagara! If this bill pass, the North will be like a man whirled in the very wildest rage of the infuriate rapids and making headlong haste toward the awful plunge.

276“Does any man believe that there can be peace if this iniquity goes forward? Will the South, with such advantage gained, easily relinquish her grip? Will the North, betrayed, wounded, and religiously aroused from the very bottom, let slave States come to the door of the Union, from the very territory of which she has been cheated, and bid them enter? Such struggles are before us as we have never seen. The next time the masses, the religious-minded men of the then undivided North, are aroused, standing on no flimsy base of compromise but on the solid foundations of humanity, of natural feeling, of a Northern national feeling springing from a love of liberty, they will not be put to sleep again by any mere pretences of peace. The finality which the South gave was a hollow truce but to give them time to forge their arms and grind their swords. They bribed the North with a lie. The next time the North reaches forth her hand it will scarcely be for gold or silver. There is more danger now of wild collisions than of lying finalities. It will come to that if the foolish counsels of timid men prevail. If civil wars are to be prevented, now is the time; courage to-day or carnage to-morrow. Firmness will give peace; trembling will bring war.       *”

Another one follows upon “The Christian’s Duty to Liberty”:

“Mar. 23, 1854.—At length God seems to have caught the wicked in their own craft. It was not in the power of all the men of the North to develop so earnest a feeling against slavery and for liberty as is now finding tongue and giving itself forth all over the North. All that for which we have been counted uncharitable by men anxious to be honorable toward the South has come to pass.

“Let the conscience of the North settle this question, not her fears. God calls us to a religious duty. Long has our talent lain in a napkin. Our testimony for liberty has been waived; our assertion of freedom has been timid and without enthusiasm. We have refused to accept at God’s hands the true mission of the North, to preach liberty to the captives and elevation to the whole human family. At length let the banner flow out to the wind, let the battle begin. There will never be another day of grace if this goes past. Retreat now and the North will never retreat again. We beseech Christian men and ministers to put this question where it belongs, upon a religious basis. Let them feel their duty in their own land as they feel their duty of preaching 277the truth of Christ, whether men will hear or whether they will forbear.

“Oh! that God, by breathing a spirit of prayer upon His people and of unflinching fidelity, would give us token that He has appeared at length for our salvation!”

In spite of all efforts to the contrary, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was effected in September of 1854, and the battle which had been fought in Congress and lost by the free States was at once transferred to the newly-admitted Territory, and was there waged with a fierceness and persistence that cannot be understood or appreciated, unless it be remembered that Kansas had become the strategic point of the whole great conflict. Given Kansas, slavery would have not only additional territory, but, what was even more important to its purposes, a majority in the United States Senate that should for ever, as it hoped, prevent the admission of more free than slave States, or the following of any course which should be prejudicial to its interests. In this new field the North at first labored under great disadvantage. The peculiar institution had already been planted and had taken root. The eastern border of Kansas was upon Missouri, a slave State which was fully aware of the advantage that broader fields would furnish the labor of her increasing slave population, and containing enough of a rough and wild frontier element to carry through any plan that desperation or villany might devise. The President of the United States Senate and acting Vice-President of the United States, David R. Atchison, was on the ground, and for months had been organizing Blue Lodges and other secret bodies, with the intent to take possession of the Territory, or at least of its polling-places, and secure it for slavery. The officers appointed by the President—a governor, three judges, a secretary, a marshal, and an attorney—were, of course, all favorable to the policy of the Administration, a policy which was all that the most radical pro-slavery advocate could desire.

The party thus happily situated did not hesitate to avail itself of its advantages. Its members swarmed across the borders at the election of a delegate to Congress, took possession of the ballot-boxes, appointed judges of election from their own number, elected their man by an overwhelming majority, and then for the most part returned to their homes in Missouri.

This was in October, 1854. In the following spring a Legislature 278was elected by the same illegal process, and proceeded at once to form a constitution most rabidly pro-slavery. It prescribed the death-penalty for any who should entice or decoy away a slave or assist him to escape, and ten years’ imprisonment for harboring or concealing a fugitive slave. To deny the right of holding slaves in the Territory, either by speaking, writing, printing or circulating books or papers, was declared to be felony, punishable with two years’ imprisonment. Having formed an elaborate constitution of the above character, and made ample provision for enforcing its requirements, they selected a site for the new State capital, called it Lecompton—after the attorney of the State, whose legal acquirements had assisted them greatly in their villany—and adjourned.

Looking upon affairs as they then appeared, and seeing that the Legislature, however elected, had been officially recognized, and that its enactments were in form legal, that the whole machinery of courts, marshals, and militia were in its hands and could be used to enforce its statutes, that it was favored by the Administration and the dominant faction at Washington, which could employ the United States army for its support, it would seem as if the battle had already been lost to the Free-State men, and that Kansas could be counted upon to give that majority in the United States Senate which the slave-power so greatly coveted. But other forces were at work. In the first place, the very enormity of these slave-laws compelled all the decent residents of Kansas, whether Free-Soil, Whig, or Democrat, to combine for their own defence against the possible outrages to which they were exposed by these enactments. In the second place, the party which had brought about the repeal of the Missouri Compromise had, by this very act, lost the control of the Lower House in Congress, and could not be relied upon to admit the Territory with its present infamous code. Besides these near and more immediate advantages, there were forces enlisted on this side that were working slowly but with great certainty toward the result aimed at by the Free-State men. The old migratory instinct which had throbbed in the veins of this race from the first, which had brought them from the steppes of Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, pushed the stronger and abler ones across the seas, moved them from the sea-coast to the foot of the Alleghanies, then drove them across this barrier to take possession 279of the great valley of the Ohio and the Mississippi, was still as active as ever and readily responded to the enticements of the new and fertile lands just opened in Kansas for settlement. No sooner was it known that the broad plains of this Territory could be occupied than the tide began to flow in this direction. Principle also came in to strengthen and ennoble this instinct.

“Then arose a majesty of self-sacrifice that had no parallel before. Instead of merely protesting, young men and maidens, laboring men, farmers, mechanics, sped with a sacred desire to rescue free territory from the toils of slavery, and emigrated in thousands, not to better their own condition, but in order that when this Territory should vote it should vote for freedom.”

Lest both instinct and principle should move too slowly or with insufficient equipment, emigrant societies were formed at the North to assist those who would offer themselves for the redemption of Kansas. One of the earliest of these to be on the ground was the “Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company,” headed by the Hon. Eli Thayer. This organization sent out a body of some thirty persons, who, in July of this year, had founded the town of Lawrence. With this company, organized, mutually acquainted, and trained in the orderly methods of New England, for a centre, there rapidly gathered a strong body, and one that well represented the bona-fide settlers of Kansas. They proceeded at once to call a mass convention and elect delegates. In due time a Constitutional Convention was called at Topeka, October 23, 1855, which formed a constitution, submitted it to the people, from whom it met with a hearty endorsement. It was then transmitted to Congress for approval.

These, Lecompton and Topeka, were the storm-centres around which surged the principal events of those turbulent times in Kansas which have been designated as “The Kansas War.” It was a wild, irregular, barbarous, and bloody strife, made up of night-attacks, house-burnings, secret murders, skirmishes between armed bodies sometimes rising to the proportions of a battle, Lawrence twice burned, Leavenworth sacked, and acts of that description, filling up four years or more of most eventful history.

Kansas at that time was the skirmish-line of two great hosts that were already settling down to a life-and-death struggle. On the one side a Legislature, as we have seen, elected largely by the votes of marauders from an adjoining State; a reckless population 280just over the line, whose historic name, Border Ruffians, seems to have been fully deserved, organized into secret bands ready to march at a moment’s warning, equipped either to vote or fight as should be required; a regiment of United States troops placed at their disposal; the whole South awake to the work they have undertaken, and forwarding supplies of men and money for the support of those already on the field; and the Administration at Washington, through portions of two presidential terms, alternately scheming and commanding for its success.

On the other hand was a Legislature, illegally convened, but elected by a large majority of the resident population of the Territory, with a constituency, some of them doubtless adventurers, some fanatics, and others possibly villains, but for the most part honest homesteaders, living, it may be, in sod huts or dug-outs, but living upon land which they had pre-empted and could call their own; the great North behind them, slowly but surely moving down to their rescue; the throb of the world’s progress beating towards them; the consciousness that they are fulfilling the purposes of God in saving this land to liberty animating them; and the great natural elements of soil, air, and sunshine, that are always on the side of liberty, working for them. These were the forces on the other side.

Each section came to the support of its skirmish-line in characteristic fashion: the South by military companies and the incursions of armed bands of raiders aiming to conquer the country, if necessary, by force of arms and overawe it into accepting its bogus State constitution. The North came in emigrant-wagons, with family, stock, house-furniture, and farm utensils, prepared to remain and occupy the land.

The general trend of the government at an early period in the strife, as seen in various acts at home and abroad, must also be taken into the account. The Ostend Manifesto, issued under the inspiration of President Pierce by our three ministers, Buchanan, Mason, and Soulé, at the courts respectively of London, Paris, and Madrid, recommended the purchase of Cuba, if possible; if not that we obtain it by force. “If Spain,” they said, “should refuse to sell Cuba to the United States, then by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from her, if we possess the power.” Slavery at this period had a foreign as well as a home policy. It was that of the old buccaneer, 281a policy of unscrupulous aggression, that would not hesitate to embroil the nation in war, if necessary for the carrying out of its designs. Filibustering expeditions, which were continually being planned and attempted at this time against Cuba and Central America, were rightly looked upon not only as additional proof of the purpose but as the initial steps in the proposed plan of foreign conquest.

As if the forces arrayed against liberty were not enough, as the conflict advanced the Supreme Court of the United States added its influence to the side of the antagonist. In the historic Dred Scott decision, given in the spring of 1857, the ground is taken that the negro slave is so completely and exclusively property, under the Constitution, that the owner can take him, as any other property, into any and all territory belonging to the United States government. In effect “the negro has no rights which the white man is bound to respect.”

After the lapse of many years, upon a calm review of that decision it is difficult to say whether the historical errors, the feeble reasoning, or the immoral sentiments most awaken our surprise and contempt. It is sufficient for our purpose at this time to know that this decision threw a vast influence against the Free-State men. If it were final, then their struggle was all in vain. Strive as much as they would, and suffer as much as they might, they could never make Kansas a free State. And yet, in spite of the Dred Scott decision, the hostility of the Administration, and all other adverse forces and circumstances, they held on. To this result had our country come through the compromises and surrenders of three-quarters of a century: slavery in possession of the machinery of government, nationalized by the highest tribunal in the land, declared to have equal rights with freedom in all the public domain, and, in logical sequence, not to be shut out from even the free States. Every institution of thirty millions of freemen was to be judged and graded, encouraged or restrained, with supreme reference to the interests of this institution. Dominant at home, it was already taking steps preparatory to foreign conquest, and the only effective obstacle in the way of the consummation of its plans was the life-and-death tenacity with which the free settlers of Kansas held to their determination that theirs should be a free State.

The contest continued for four years before any substantial 282advantage was gained for the Free State party. Four governors, three appointed by President Pierce and one by President Buchanan, had successively been sent, and then deposed and disgraced because they could not, or would not, carry out the unjust measures proposed by the Administration. The victory in Congress in 1858 was simply a resubmission of the Lecompton constitution to the people of the State to be voted upon, whether they would accept it or frame one for themselves. They of course buried it amid universal execrations. Slight and unmistakably just as was this concession of Congress, it was nevertheless secured but by a small majority. The change of five votes would have passed the notorious Lecompton Bill, admitted the State with slavery into the Union, added two senators to the slave-power, restored the supremacy of that power in the Senate of the United States, to be followed by the carrying out the Dred Scott decision to its logical consequences, slavery supremacy at home, slavery aggression, annexation, and expansion over Cuba and Central America, abroad. A vast slave-empire stretching from the lakes to the southern shores of the Caribbean Sea seemed not an improbable dream, if there had not been wisdom enough or will enough to fight the battle out in Kansas. All honor to those brave men and women who in those days saved this Territory to the North! All honor to those who stood by them and helped them to win! A more important battle was never fought in our history, and a more heroic spirit was never shown. What the château of Hougoumont, held by the British right centre, was to the battle of Waterloo; what the “Bloody Angle” held by Hancock was to the battle of Spottsylvania Court-House, such was the Kansas war in the early and determining era of the great American conflict.

Call this four years of struggle one battle, and it will take rank with the “fifteen great battles” of the world’s history, second in importance to none.

We have thus given an outline of this great preliminary struggle of the war, that Mr. Beecher’s position and labors, which were much criticised at the time, may be seen in their true light. As is well known, he threw himself into this work with all the enthusiasm which such an emergency might be supposed to awaken. He felt the importance of the struggle and the need of instant action. Since, under the doctrine of “squatter sovereignty,” 283which had taken the place of the former restriction, the question of freedom or slavery in Kansas must be decided by the vote of the actual settlers, these must be aided to emigrate to that Territory from the North, and at once. Since they were to be the foundation elements of a Christian State, they should be supplied with Bibles; and since they would doubtless be called upon to defend themselves against attack, they must be supplied with firearms. He lectured and took up collections in Plymouth Church and from the lecture platform for Sharp’s rifles, an arm then but just come into notice. He preached, lectured, and bought rifles with the same object in view—to redeem men to liberty; and with the same spirit—love to God and man. Some of the rifles, it is said, were sent in boxes marked Bibles, but without his knowledge, and so passed in safety through Missouri and the enemy’s lines. Hence the term Beecher’s Bibles came to be applied to these effective weapons.

At this time he published his famous “Defence of Kansas,” that showed not more clearly the warmth of his spirit than his clear understanding of the issues at stake and the dangers that were impending:

“A battle is to be fought. If we are wise it will be bloodless. If we listen to the pusillanimous counsels of men who have never shown one throb of sympathy for liberty, we shall have blood to the horses’ bridles. If we are firm and prompt to obvious duty, if we stand by the men of Kansas and give them all the help they need, the flames of war will be quenched before it bursts forth, and both they of the West and we of the East shall, after some angry mutterings, rest down in peace. But if our ears are poisoned by the advice of men who never rebuke violence on the side of power, and never fail to inveigh against the self-defence of wronged liberty, we shall invite aggression and civil war. And let us know assuredly that civil war will not burst forth in Kansas without spreading. Now, if bold wisdom prevails, the conflict will be settled afar off in Kansas, and without blows or blood. But timidity and indifference will bring down blows there, which will not only echo in our houses hitherward, but will by and by lay the foundation for an armed struggle between the whole North and the South. Shall we let the spark kindle, or shall we quench it now? But, that intelligent citizens may the better judge, let the facts of this case be reviewed....

284“There was never so strong an appeal to public sympathy as that which is presented in the case of Kansas free settlers. Their emigration was a mission of mercy, full of the ripest fruits of Christianity. Their conduct has been noble. They have borne hardships without faltering, they have borne outrage and persecution with patience, returning good for evil. They have suffered wrongs manifold and infinitely provoking, without retaliation. When aggression on one occasion was pushed so sorely that their patience failed, some of the men said: ‘We cannot bear such wrongs.’ The reply made by Pomeroy will become a maxim of Christian men: ‘Be patient! your wrongs are your very strength.’

“When the armed day came, and their adversaries came out to consume them, then, and only then, they took up arms and surrounded their homes with living men, determined not to attack, but never to surrender.... Once when England only asserted the right to tax the colonies without representation, the colonies rebelled and went to war. But now a foreign Legislature has been imposed upon Kansas. That Legislature has legalized slavery against the known wishes of nine-tenths of the actual settlers. It has decreed that no man shall enter the Territory who will not take an oath of allegiance to this spurious Legislature. It has made it death to give liberty to the man escaping from oppression. It has muzzled the press. It has forbidden discussion. It has made free speech a penitentiary offence. The rights for which the old colonists fought were superficial compared with these. These are the rights which lie at the very heart of personal liberty.

“Indeed, there can be no personal freedom where free speech, a free press, a free canvass and discussion are penitentiary offences! These are the laws which the President is determined to enforce! Congress is to be asked for money to sustain this government in Kansas, or to pay for an army to cut the throats of every free citizen who will not yield to this infamy!...

“Peace in Kansas means peace everywhere; war there will be war all over the land. Now it can be stopped. But fear will not do it. A truculent peace will not do it. Indolence and presumptuous prayer will but hasten the mischief. When tyrants are in arms they who cry peace become their confederates. Manliness, action, courage, and ample preparation for defence will stop 285the danger. The Providence that will help us is the Providence that we help. God works for those who work for Him. When He answers prayer for harvests He inspires men to work, and petitions for crops and harvests are answered through ploughs and spades. And God will answer prayers for peace by inspiring men with justice, with abhorrence of oppression; by making good men bold and active, and bad men feeble and cowardly; by stopping the ears of the community to the counsel of cowards and hypocrites. Let every man in this awful crisis not fail to pray, and, that they may pray without hypocrisy, let them watch and work! How shall we dare ask God to save us from bloodshed when we will not use the means He has put into our hands? Faith without works and prayer without works are dead—stone-dead. Let the emigrants go hither and thither by hundreds, and pray as they go! Let them that have money now pour it out, and pray as they give! Let them that have sons in Kansas send them arms, and pray that they may have no occasion to use them; but that, if they must be used, that the son may so wield them that the mother be not ashamed of the son whom she bore! Let them that have influence speak out! Let ministers and Christian free men now, if ever, speak against barbarism and uphold the whole retinue of Christian institutions! Let those whose tongue has been hitherto palsied by evil advisers now loose their tongue and speak! Of whom will the land take counsel? There have been two sorts of counsellors hitherto. One has pointed out for twenty years the nature of slavery, its tendencies, the dangers which it threatened; and all the prophecies have come true. The other kind of counsellors have predicted peace, dissuaded from action, urged compromise, and at each reluctant step have promised the country peace. In not a single instance have they been right. Events have overthrown every one of their promises. They have led us down deeper into trouble at every step. We have been betrayed by kisses. Excitements have deepened, lessons have multiplied, compromises have bred cockatrices. We are spun over with webs. We are tangled with sophistries. We have everything but manliness, straightforwardness, courage, and decisive wisdom....

“But what is done must be done quickly. Funds must be freely given; arms must be had, even if bought at the price mentioned by our Saviour: ‘He that hath no sword, let him sell his 286garment and buy one.’ Young men who would do aught for liberty should take no counsel of fear. Now is the time when a man may do for his country in an hour more than in a whole life besides. Time flies. Events hasten. Fear and treacherous peace, that betray duty with ignorant words of religion, will ruin all; but energy, courage, action will save all. Woe to us if war comes from our fault! If it comes, on the skirts of false peace will its blood be found!”

Of the result of this sending armed colonists into Kansas he speaks a few weeks later:

“Of all the revolutions on record, we remember none so remarkable as that which has been wrought by Sharp’s rifles. We do not know that a single man has ever been injured by them. They are guiltless of blood. But the principle which they involve has brought the whole South to a protest against violence, even in the extremest necessity of self-defence! These aforetime heroes of the knife and revolver are now deep in the Scriptures. They are quoting all the peaceable texts; they hang with irrepressible delight over all those passages which teach forbearance.”

Being attacked in a religious paper for his aggressive attitude, he answers: “We have acted consistently with our settled belief. We have NOTHING to retract.”

An event that took place at this time added still more fuel to the hot indignation that was glowing through the North—the attack by Preston S. Brooks, of South Carolina, upon Charles Sumner, May 22, 1856, in the Senate Chamber. It was an act so cowardly and atrocious that it cannot be recalled after these many years without a tingling of the blood. If a blow had been given at the moment of the debate, if the man seeking redress had approached his adversary face to face and given him opportunity to defend himself, if it had been but a single blow, possibly some extenuation could be offered; but to strike a man a stunning blow without warning, when he is sitting at his desk and so hampered that he is unable to rise until he has torn the desk up from its fastenings; to follow with more than a score of blows until the instrument of attack, a heavy cane, is broken to pieces and his victim is left senseless—is an act that, search where it may, can find nothing to add to its infamy. Among the meetings called all over the North to give voice to the anger of 287the people at this dastardly act, one was in New York City. The advertised speakers were William M. Evarts, John Van Buren, Daniel Lord, Jr., and others of eminence. The speeches were able but tame and conservative. They did not meet the demand of the popular heart over that tremendous outrage. Just as the meeting was being adjourned Mr. Beecher was discovered in the back part of the room, having come in to listen to men whose reputation was so great but whom he had never heard. At once the cry from the unsatisfied audience was “Beecher, Beecher!”

So unexpected was the call, and so annoyed was he at being called out, that it required almost physical force to get him to take the platform; but when once there his soul kindled with the occasion. A simple recital of facts led the audience step by step over the ground which had been traversed for the last ten years. The grand principles of our polity were uncovered to their view. Scene after scene was depicted by his marvellous dramatic power, culminating in that outrage in the Senate Chamber on account of which they had gathered; and the audience, alternately moved by his pathos, fired by his passion, or swept by his humor, became one with the speaker. They saw as he saw, they felt as he felt; and he stamped them that night with the impress of his hatred of slavery and his burning enthusiasm for liberty. The next day the press carried this impression to the multitude of its readers, and, dismissing the other speeches of the evening with a formal notice, gave his as nearly as possible verbatim. It was his meeting for the first time upon the platform with the leading men of the country, and from that hour he took his place with them and held it to the end.

Many leading men in Massachusetts having been invited to a similar meeting held in Boston, and sending regrets, he analyzes their excuses in a Star Paper upon “Hearts and no Hearts”:

“Admirable! The man is sacrificed to the position. No tear, no indignation, no heart-felt throb, no voice or gesture which befits an open and free heart. All instincts and spontaneity must be judged by supposed interests of a professorship. In such cases as this the man is a mere Jonah in the whale’s belly. His professorship has swallowed his manhood! Alas for the whale!”

Of this attack on Sumner he said in the Star article of June 12, “Silence must be Nationalized”:

288“This deed stands absolutely alone in our history. It has not a single fellow! There have been brutal things, and cruel things, and mean things, and cowardly things, and wicked and inhuman wrongs, but nothing before that epitomized them all. With the exception of one or two papers, the whole South has accepted the act and made it representative! It is no longer Brooks that struck Sumner! He was the arm, but the whole South was the body! And with one consent it is declared that for the crime of free speech it was done and deserved!”

In the meantime a new party, born of this conflict, was rapidly coming into power. Made up of elements apparently most diverse, it was brought together by a common purpose and fused into one by a grand enthusiasm. There was, for a nucleus, the larger part of the old Free-Soil party, that had been in existence since 1842; then came Abolitionists, of which there had been for years a sprinkling in all the Northern States; seceders from the Whig party, called in New York State “Silver Grays,” and from the Democratic party, called “Barnburners;” and a multitude of others, a daily increasing host, vital in every member with the spirit of the hour. Combining some of the best elements of all the parties, it had a breadth of power that no one party could have given it alone. While it had enough men of experience in affairs to secure wisdom of action, its recruits were for the most part young men, who brought the inspiration of their youth, their numbers, their hope, and their indignation. After a preliminary mass convention in Pittsburgh on Washington’s birthday, February 22, 1856, they met in Philadelphia and adopted a platform of principles and nominated candidates for President and Vice-President.

In this platform they gave their attention mostly to the great issue of supreme importance—that between liberty and slavery. Their action here was positive and unequivocal: no more slave territory; no more coddling of slave institutions. Upon this platform it nominated John C. Fremont for its standard-bearer, and organized its hosts for the great presidential contest of that year.

The party thus brought before the country had some great advantages over all rivals. The Whig party was already dead, although not yet fully conscious of the fact, and awaiting burial; the Democratic party was inextricably associated, for weal or for woe, with the slave-power; while the Know-Nothing party 289was but a mushroom, and a poisonous variety at that. On the other hand, this new organization was intensely alive. It had a definite object in view and was not afraid to avow it. It had the strength of intense moral conviction. Its cause gave opportunity for inspiration and awakened the grandest enthusiasm. It was in harmony with the fundamental principles of our nation and the early struggles of our people. It was in sympathy with the great movement of the age in all lands. Its lengthening lines and the rising hosts of the Old World were parts of the same army. Its standard-bearer, by reason of his youth, adventurous career, and brilliant service, was well adapted to awaken a loyal and spirited following. It had nothing to conceal; it had nothing to fear; it carried with it the hopes of the nation and the world. Adopting the “Marseillaise,” the greatest liberty song that was ever written, it adapted its own chorus to the music and sang at its meetings with boundless enthusiasm:

Mr. Beecher gave himself unreservedly to this contest:

“Well, of course we felt all aflame. My church voted me all the time that I thought to be required to go out into the community and speak and canvass the State of New York. I went into that canvass, spoke twice and often three times a week, having the whole day to myself—that is, making all the speeches that were made. I was sent principally to what we called the Silver-Gray districts or counties—the old-time Whigs that were attempting to run a candidate between Fremont and Buchanan. I generally made a three hours’ speech a day in the open air to audiences of from eight to ten thousand people. I felt at that time that it was very likely that I should sacrifice my life, or my voice at any rate, but I was willing to lay down either or both of them for that cause.”

Of Mr. Beecher’s contributions to the literature of the campaign we can, for lack of space, give but few quotations, and these only as they afford an idea of the humorous and enthusiastic manner in which he stood up for his candidate. In the 290close scrutiny of private life, which is so marked a feature of presidential campaigns, it had been learned that John C. Fremont and Jessie Benton had fallen in love with each other, and, her father not approving of his daughter’s selection, the two lovers had made a runaway match of it, and in their haste had been married by a Roman Catholic priest. This escapade was being used against the candidate by the opposite party, not because he ran away with the fair Jessie—the ballot of the average American voter would as likely be won as lost by such an exhibition of youthful enterprise—but because it helped to prove, what was persistently claimed, that he was a Roman Catholic. In answer Mr. Beecher wrote a vigorous article disproving the charge, and justifying the groom in securing the services of any one competent to perform the marriage ceremony, closing with these words: “Like a true lover and gallant man, Fremont said that he did not care who married him, so that it was done quick and strong. If we had been in Colonel Fremont’s place we would have been married if it had required us to walk through a row of priests and bishops as long as from Washington to Rome, ending up with the Pope himself!”

He ridicules the persistency with which certain newspapers returned to the attack upon Fremont on the assumed ground of his being a Roman Catholic, with the story of “The Dog Noble and the Empty Hole,” that probably did as good campaign service as any story that was ever written:

“The first summer which we spent in Lenox we had along a very intelligent dog named Noble. He was learned in many things, and by his dog-lore excited the undying admiration of all the children. But there were some things which Noble could never learn. Having on one occasion seen a red squirrel run into a hole in a stone wall, he could not be persuaded that he was not there for evermore!...

“The intense enthusiasm of the dog at that hole can hardly be described. He filled it full of barking. He pawed and scratched as if undermining a bastion. Standing off at a little distance, he would pierce the hole with a gaze as intense and fixed as if he were trying magnetism on it. Then, with tail extended and every hair thereon electrified, he would rush at the empty hole with a prodigious onslaught.

“This imaginary squirrel haunted Noble night and day. The 291very squirrel himself would run up before his face into the tree, and, crouched in a crotch, would sit silently watching the whole process of bombarding the empty hole with great sobriety and relish. But Noble would allow of no doubts. His conviction that that hole had a squirrel in it continued unshaken for six weeks. When all other occupations failed this hole remained to him. When there were no more chickens to harry, no pigs to bite, no cattle to chase, no children to romp with, no expeditions to make with the grown folks, and when he had slept all that his dog-skin would hold, he would walk out of the yard, yawn and stretch himself, and then look wistfully at the hole, as if thinking to himself: ‘Well, as there is nothing else to do, I may as well try that hole again!’

“We had almost forgotten this little trait until the conduct of the New York Express in respect to Colonel Fremont’s religion brought it ludicrously to mind again. Colonel Fremont is, and always has been, as sound a Protestant as John Knox ever was. He was bred in the Protestant faith and has never changed....

“But the Express, like Noble, has opened on this hole in the wall, and can never be done barking at it. Day after day it resorts to this empty hole. When everything else fails this resource remains. There they are indefatigably—the Express and Noble—a church without a Fremont, and a hole without a squirrel in it!...

“We never read the Express nowadays without thinking involuntarily, ‘Goodness! the dog is letting off at that hole again.’”

The election of 1856 resulted, as is well known, in the choice of James Buchanan for President. Since his policy was dictated by the same power behind the throne as that of Mr. Pierce, it was, of course, not unlike that of his predecessor; and this era in the great conflict which opened with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise closes with the Administration at Washington more than ever submissive to the demands of the South. But it also closes with the right wing of the great army of liberty, whose lines reached from the Atlantic to the roots of the Rocky Mountains, securely entrenched and holding its position, and with continually increasing numbers, barring farther aggressions of slavery for ever.

Remarkable experiences—The Edmonson Sisters—Pinky and her Freedom-Ring—Slave Auction in Plymouth Church—John Brown—The Wrong and Right Way—Election of Abraham Lincoln—Secession—Buchanan’s Fast.

While these larger public matters were engaging his attention there was an equally engrossing field of private activity in which he was constantly engaged, and which developed into some very peculiar and remarkable experiences. As early as 1848 we find him conducting an auction sale, in New York City, of the two Edmonson sisters.

This case at the time attracted wide attention. Two respectable young women of light complexion, living in Washington City, had the misfortune to be born while the mother was a slave. After they had grown to womanhood they found that the former owner of their parent was about to sell them to a slave-dealer for exportation to New Orleans and the market. Despairing of being able to raise the exorbitant sum at which they were valued, and not knowing how to escape from a doom far more dreadful than death, they risked everything by going on board the Pearl schooner with seventy-seven others, in the hope of escaping to a land of liberty and purity. The ship was captured and they were hurried off to Slater’s Den, Baltimore, and thence to New Orleans. By some most extraordinary providences they were brought back from New Orleans to Washington, and their sad case at length reached the ears of those who had hearts to feel and means to save. A meeting was held in the Tabernacle October 23, at which Dr. Dowling and Mr. Beecher spoke with so much effect that $2,200 were raised and the captives were free. Mr. Beecher’s speech is described by an eye-witness, himself a minister, as beyond anything he has ever heard before or since. He extemporized there on the stage an auction of a Christian slave. The enumeration of his qualities by the auctioneer, and the bids that followed, were given by the speaker in perfect character. He made the scene as realistic as one of Hogarth’s 293pictures and as lurid as a Rembrandt. Physical excellences, mental, moral, and spiritual qualities, are each dwelt on with an emphasis and moving effect that proved that he would have made a capital auctioneer if he had chosen that business.

“And more than all that, gentlemen, they say he is one of those praying Methodist niggers; who bids? A thousand—fifteen hundred—two thousand—twenty-five hundred! Going, going! last call! Gone!”

The audience were wrought up to a perfect frenzy of excitement while that picture was being drawn, and when real contributions instead of imaginary bids were called for, the sum was easily raised and the girls were free. He says of it: “I think that of all the meetings that I have attended in my life, for a panic of sympathy I never saw one that surpassed that. I have seen a great many in my day. An amount of money was subscribed, and they were bought and set free. The mother was a very old woman. She had been a nurse of a great Richmond lawyer whose name has died out of my memory. He owed his conversion to her. He was famous in the days of Webster.”

We have lying before us as we write a little leather-covered account-book, soiled and worn by use, which has upon its first pages letters from various humanitarians—William Lloyd Garrison being among the number—recommending to the Christian public one Pomona Brice, who “is engaged in collecting money to secure the ransom of her daughter and two grandchildren who are scattered somewhere in North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri.” The names of subscribers follow, with the sums subscribed—ranging from twenty-five cents to ten dollars—among which stands the familiar autograph “H. W. Beecher, if the whole is made up, five dollars.” Receipts from the different savings-banks where she had deposited the money; a letter from her lawyer to Mr. Beecher telling him that at her request he had examined the laws of the above-mentioned States, and found them all against her; a bill for his services and a judgment of the court against her for $100, all either directed or entrusted to Mr. Beecher, give us an inkling of another kind of work that wore upon his time, sympathy, and purse.

Not only did he help by his subscriptions some poor mother or grandmother to buy the liberty of her children or grandchildren, but sometimes brought the slave upon Plymouth pulpit 294and raised the money for its redemption on the spot. A handful of letters in our possession gives the preliminaries to such a transaction.

One is from a Mr. Blake, who has called on the “nigger trader” and obtained the refusal of the child for $900, and has also “obtained four or five good names to a bond for the payment of the money or return of the child. When I told the grandmother what I had done the poor old soul cried for joy. ‘God bless you!’ she said. ‘I will sit up all night to get you some breakfast. You have saved my child.’” Then comes a hitch in the proceedings. A partner to the trader before spoken of appeared. He hated “the d——— Abolitionists, and would not let the child go among them.” “Do you not think something could be done without the child? She has light flaxen hair. Her owner said I would easily get her on the cars, for no one would know her from a white child. The grandmother has purchased herself. She has also saved up about $200 to support her in her old age. She is willing to give this. If we take it we shall want $700 more. If you can do anything, in God’s name do it and save the child.

In some way, the letters do not tell us how, the difficulties were overcome. The permission of the joint owners of this flaxen-haired girl was obtained, bonds were given to the railroads as well as the owners to secure them from loss in case this property should not be returned, and the child was brought to the auction-block of Plymouth pulpit and was bought for liberty.

The following is Mr. Beecher’s farther account of this matter:

“Before the passage of the Red Sea, before the escape of the Israelites (in this country, not in Egypt), I was accustomed, from time to time, to buy slaves here; and it was thrown up that this was one of the best slave-auction places anywhere to be found—that better prices were obtained for slaves that were put up for sale here than for any others. Some thought there was an inconsistency in it. I did not. I was always glad, at suitable times, as often as was proper, to bring before you living men and women, and let them stand and look you in the face, that you might see what sort of creatures slaves were made of. I was glad by every means in my power to arouse men’s feelings against the abomination of slavery, which I hated with an unutterable 296hatred, and which I hate still in memory as much as then I hated it in substance and in fact.

Pinky’s Freedom-Ring.

“Well, at one time there was a girl named ‘Pink,’ or ‘Pinky,’ brought here. She came through the agency of G. Faulkner Blake, a brother of one of our own members. He was studying in the Episcopal Seminary at Alexandria, I believe. He learned from her old grandmother that ‘Pinky,’ who was too fair and beautiful a child for her own good, was to be taken away from the grandmother and sent South.

“To make a long story short, those interested in the girl wrote me to see if I could purchase her. I replied, ‘I cannot unless you send her North’; and there was trouble in bringing her here. I wrote that I would be responsible for her, and that she would be lawfully purchased or sent back.

“I remember that the pen-keeper paid me a compliment which I shall never forget, by saying that if Henry Ward Beecher had given his word he considered it better than a bond. So she was brought here and placed upon this platform; and the rain never fell faster than the tears fell from many of you that were here. The scene was one of intense enthusiasm. The child was bought, and overbought. The collection that was taken on the spot was enough, and more than enough, to purchase her. It so happened (it is not wrong to mention now) that a lady known to literary fame as Miss Rose Terry was present; and as, like many others, she had not with her as much money as she wanted to give, she took a ring off from her hand and threw it into the contribution-box. That ring I took and put on the child’s hand, and said to her, ‘Now remember that this is your freedom-ring.’ Her expression, as she stood and looked at it for a moment, was pleasing to behold; and Eastman Johnson, the artist, was so much interested in the occurrence that he determined to represent it on canvas, and he painted her looking at her freedom-ring; and I have a transcript of the picture now at my house in the parlor, and any of you can see it by asking.

“So the girl was redeemed. She went back South after her redemption; but she was in the North for a time and received some rudiments of education. At length I lost sight of her until 1864, I think, when she was at Chief-Justice Chase’s, and I received word that she wished to see me.

“It seems that ‘Pinky’ was not a good enough name for 297her when she was free, though it was when she was a slave; so they mixed things and called her ‘Ward,’ after my name, and ‘Rose,’ after the name of this lady; and ever since her name has been Rose Ward—a very nice name indeed. She then had grown to be a young woman, and was very fair. I supposed she would probably live and die in labor to support herself and her grandmother, who was becoming infirm; but it seems that she has shown uncommon intelligence, and has manifested a very earnest desire to become a laborer for her people, and she is to be educated and to become a teacher and missionary among them.

“Now, it suits me exactly to have this child brought out of slavery, redeemed on this platform, and grow up and develop a Christian disposition, and go back and labor for her people. She does not know anything about it, but if we can raise $150 she shall have a year’s schooling in the Lincoln University at Washington. It seems to me as though there was poetic justice and fitness in it. As you redeemed her in the first instance from slavery, in the second instance you must redeem her from ignorance by contributing the amount necessary to send her a year to that university.“ And it was done.

An account of another is found in the weekly press:

A handful of photographs of children, white and beautiful, who had been set free, have come to my hand with the above letters. Having to do with white-faced, flaxen-haired children born under the curse of slavery; with mothers carrying their little account-books from house to house, gathering funds wherewith to accomplish the apparently hopeless task of first finding their children who had been swept away from them in the black maelstrom of slavery, and then of purchasing them; of grandmothers who wept for joy at the prospect of saving their grandchildren, and willingly surrendered all the money which they had laid aside for their old age if it could be accomplished, would make a man tender toward the victims and hard against the system which caused their trouble.

Through this course of training he walked in these years, his heart now dissolved in tears and now hot with righteous indignation. No compromise, no surrender, no betrayal, no yielding, but the destruction of slavery and the salvation of the Union.

The Kansas and Nebraska troubles had resulted in more than establishing certain theories or in deciding the status of portions of our territory. It had intensified the feeling in both sections of our country, and men were being irreconcilably divided upon the subject of slavery. Out of these troublous times sprang John Brown, originally a farmer, born in the northern part of Connecticut, and emigrating to Ohio when a child. In 1854 his four elder sons migrated to Kansas, joining with the thousands from the North to make that a free State and to secure homes for themselves and their families. Plundered and harassed, they wrote to their father to procure arms. To make sure that they should get these he went with them. This was his introduction into Kansas. We have no design of following out his history in detail, but only claim that his fanatical zeal and his unreasonable expectations were the product of the times in which he lived and the experiences which he suffered, acting upon a temperament peculiarly unselfish, heroic, and religious. Enough for us is it to know that his course led him, with an army of sixteen men, to the capture of Harper’s Ferry and to a conflict with the whole State of Virginia, in fact with the power of the whole United States government, and ultimately to the scaffold. His courage, his 301calmness, his undoubting faith in the future deliverance of the slaves, crowned by his heroic death, made his name the war-cry of the future legions of the loyal States, who sang as they marched:

The attack on Harper’s Ferry was made October 17. On Sunday evening, October 30, Henry Ward Beecher preached upon “The Harper’s Ferry Tragedy,” and gives his judgment of the principal actor in the following language:

“An old man, kind at heart, industrious, peaceful, went forth with a large family of children, to seek a new home in Kansas. That infant colony held thousands of souls as noble as liberty ever inspired or religion enriched. A great scowling slave State, its nearest neighbor, sought to tread down this liberty-loving colony and to dragoon slavery into it by force of arms. The armed citizens of another State crossed the State lines, destroyed the freedom of the ballot-box, prevented a fair expression of public sentiment, corruptly usurped law-making power and ordained by fraud laws as infamous as the sun ever saw, assaulted its infant settlements with armed hordes, ravaged the fields, destroyed harvests and herds, and carried death to a multitude of cabins. The United States government had no marines for this occasion! No Federal troops were posted by cars night and day for the poor, the weak, the grossly-wronged men in Kansas. There was an army there that unfurled the banner of the Union, but it was on the side of the wrong-doers, not on the side of the injured.

“It was in this field that Brown received his impulse. A tender father, whose life was in his sons’ life, he saw his first-born seized like a felon, chained, driven across the country, crazed by suffering and heat, beaten by the officer in charge like a dog, and long lying at death’s door! Another noble boy, without warning, without offence, unarmed, in open day, in the midst of the city, was shot dead! No justice sought out the murderers. No United States attorney was despatched in hot haste. No marines or soldiers aided the wronged and weak!

“The shot that struck the child’s heart crazed the father’s brain. Revolving his wrongs and nursing his hatred of that 302deadly system that breeds such contempt of justice and humanity, at length his phantoms assume a slender form and organize such an enterprise as one might expect from a man whom grief had bereft of good judgment. He goes to the heart of a slave State: one man—and sixteen followers! He seizes two thousand brave Virginians and holds them in duress.

“When a great State attacked a handful of weak colonies the government and nation were torpid; but when seventeen men attacked a sovereign State, then Maryland arms, and Virginia arms, and the United States government arms, and they three rush against seventeen men!

“Travellers tell us that the Geysers of Iceland—those singular boiling springs of the North—may be transported with fury by plucking up a handful of grass or turf and throwing them into the springs. The hot springs of Virginia are of the same kind! A handful of men was thrown into them, and what a boiling there has been!

“But meanwhile no one can fail to see that this poor, child-bereft old man is the manliest of them all. Bold, unflinching, honest, without deceit or dodge, refusing to take technical advantages of any sort, but openly avowing his principles and motives, glorying in them in danger and death as much as when in security—that wounded old father is the most remarkable figure in this whole drama. The governor, the officers of the State, and all the attorneys are pigmies compared to him.

“I deplore his misfortunes. I sympathize with his sorrows. I mourn the hiding or obscuration of his reason. I disapprove of his mad and feeble schemes. I shrink from the folly of the bloody foray, and I shrink, likewise, from all the anticipations of that judicial bloodshed which, doubtless, ere long will follow—for when was cowardice ever magnanimous? They will kill the man, not for treason, but for proving them cowards!

“By and by, when men look back and see without prejudice that whole scene, they will not be able to avoid saying: ‘What must be the measure of manhood in a scene where a crazed old man stood head and shoulders above those who had their whole reason? What is average citizenship when a lunatic is a hero?’”

He also availed himself of this opportunity to show the wrong way and the right way in our treatment of this whole question of slavery. I can only mention the heads, but they so far outline 303his whole principle of action during the war that I give them that his position may be understood:

“1st. We have no right to treat the citizens of the South with acrimony and bitterness because they are involved in a system of wrong-doing.”

“2d. The breeding of discontent among the bondmen of our land is not the way to help them.”

“3d. No relief will be carried to the slaves or to the South as a body by any individual or organized plans to carry them off or to incite them to abscond.”

As to the right way:

“1st. If we would benefit the African at the South we must begin at home. No one can fail to see the inconsistency between our treatment of those amongst us who are in the lower walks of life and our professions of sympathy for the Southern slaves. How are the free colored people treated at the North? They are almost without education, with but little sympathy for ignorance. They are refused the common rights of citizenship which the whites enjoy. They cannot even ride in the cars of our city railroads. They are snuffed at in the house of God, or tolerated with ill-disguised disgust. Can the black man be a mason in New York? Let him be employed as a journeyman, and every Irish lover of liberty that carries the hod or trowel would leave at once or compel him to leave! Can the black man be a carpenter? There is scarcely a carpenter’s shop in New York in which a journeyman would continue to work if a black man were employed in it. Can the black man compete in the common industries of life? There is scarcely one in which he can engage. He is crowded down, down, down, through the most menial callings, to the bottom of society. We tax them, and then refuse to allow their children to go to our public schools. We tax them, and then refuse to sit by them in God’s house. We heap upon them moral obloquy more atrocious than that which the master heaps upon the slave.”

“2d. We must quicken all the springs of feeling in the free States in behalf of human liberty, and create a public sentiment based upon truth and true manhood.”

“3d. By all the ways consistent with a fearless assertion of truth, we must maintain sympathy and kindness toward the South. If, in view of the wrongs of slavery, you say that you do not care 304for the master but only the slave, I reply that you should care for both master and slave! If you do not care for the fate of the wrong-doing white man, I do care for the fate of the wrong-doing white man! But even though your sympathy were only for the slave, then for his sake you ought to set your face against, and discountenance anything like, an insurrectionary spirit.”

“4th. We are to leave no pains untaken, through the Christian conscience of the South, to give to the slave himself a higher moral status.”

“5th. The few virtues which shall lead inevitably to emancipation are to be established and insisted upon—the right of chastity in the woman, unblemished household love, and the right of parents to their children. The moment these three stand secure, that moment slavery will have its death-blow struck.”

“6th. And, lastly, among the means to be employed for promoting the liberty of the slave we must not fail to include the power of true Christian prayer. When slavery shall cease it will be by such instruments and influences that shall exhibit God’s hand and heart in the work. May He, in His own way and time, speed the day!”

With such radical yet conservative and kindly speech, bringing home to his audience their own deficiencies and pointing out the way that must be taken, did he temper and direct the hot passion of those fiery days.

The heat occasioned by the John Brown raid in the fall of 1859 was not cooled by the after-events that occurred both in and out of Congress during the following winter; and the country came to nominating its candidates in 1860 in a state of the most intense feeling. Four parties were in the field, each representing as its essential characteristic some phase of feeling towards slavery. Among them stood the Republican party, with a well-defined purpose, clearly understood and openly declared—no interference with and no extension of slavery. Abraham Lincoln was its nominee for President. Mr. Beecher had met him in 1859 when he came to New York to deliver his speech at Cooper Institute, and, with his quick perception of the ability of men, and already well acquainted with his record, had placed confidence in this tall, gaunt Westerner from the first. He had doubted the policy of nominating Mr. Seward, and one of his 305first interviews with a member of the New York delegation, who had labored earnestly but vainly for his nomination, is thus described: “With a laugh that was almost a roar he burst into the editorial room where Mr. Raymond sat, his chair tilted upon its two fore legs, and, grasping him cordially, heartily, vigorously, said: ‘Young man, I know the people of this country at heart better than you do. Your friend Seward has too much head and too little heart to succeed in any such crisis as this.’

“‘And yours,’ replied Mr. Raymond, ‘I fear, has too much heart and too little head for such a crisis as will assuredly be precipitated.’

“‘Trust, then,’ replied Mr. Beecher, ‘in God, and keep your powder dry.’”

For the election of their nominee Mr. Beecher labored with pen and voice to the utmost of his ability. His sermons Sunday evenings often had reference to the great questions of the day. His lectures of this period were little more than political addresses, and by his Star Papers in the Independent, which were largely copied in other papers, he made his views known to the reading public throughout the land. Believing that the election of Abraham Lincoln was of the utmost importance, he gave himself unreservedly to make it an accomplished fact, and made himself as obnoxious to the timid and time-serving as he was admirable to the opposite party. Of this period he says: “We next had to flounder through the quicksands of four infamous years under President Buchanan, in which senators sworn to the Constitution were plotting to destroy that Constitution; in which the members of the Cabinet, who drew their pay month by month, used their official position, by breach of public trust and oath of allegiance, to steal arms, to prepare fortifications, and make ready disruption and war. The most astounding spectacle the world ever saw was then witnessed—a great people paying men to sit in the places of power and offices of trust to betray them.”

Most portentous events followed the election. State after State in the South called their conventions and passed decrees of secession, in every case, except in South Carolina, by the jugglery of political leaders, in spite of the popular vote.vote. Representatives withdrew from the House, senators from the Senate, and members from the Cabinet, and flocked to Montgomery, Ga., where a rebel government was being organized. The most 306specious arguments were urged in justification of secession, were substantially admitted even by so excellent an authority as the New York Tribune, and the right to coerce a sovereign State, as well as the expediency of the attempt, was denied by a large portion of the Northern press. Preparations to make secession successful, if resisted, were made openly, while the denial of the right to prevent the same tied the hands of the government and left it powerless in the toils of its enemies. In the meantime different schemes of conciliation, all amounting to some species of concession or compromise, were advanced both in and out of Congress, and urged to the very utmost possible limit of forbearance and kindness. Against “peace at any price” and all patched-up compromises Mr. Beecher, together with a multitude of others of like feeling at the North, threw his influence.

His Thanksgiving sermon this year was upon this topic: “Against a Compromise of Principle.” He recounts the common but abundant blessings of the year, and gathers assurance that they are from God on the following testimony.

“All the sons of God rejoice and all good men rejoice. It needs but one element to complete the satisfaction. If we could be sure that this is God’s mercy, meant for good and tending thereto, we should have a full cup to-day. That satisfaction is not denied us. The Mayor of New York, in a public proclamation, in view of this prodigal year that has heaped the poor man’s house with abundance, is pleased to say that there is no occasion apparent to him for thanksgiving. We can ask no more. When bad men grieve at the state of public affairs, good men should rejoice. When infamous men keep fast, righteous men should have thanksgiving. God reigns and the devil trembles. Amen. Let us rejoice!”

He then describes the true nature of the compromise that is asked, and shows the impossibility of making any that shall be satisfactory to either side:

“We are told that Satan appears under two forms—that when he has a good, fair field he is out like a lion, roaring and seeking whom he may devour; but that when he can do nothing more in that way he is a serpent and sneaks in the grass. And so it is slavery open, bold, roaring, aggressive, or it is slavery sneaking in the grass and calling itself compromise. It is the same devil under either name. If by compromise is only meant forbearance, 307kindness, well-wishing, conciliation, fidelity to agreements, a concession in things, not principles, why then we believe in compromise, only that is not compromise, interpreted by the facts of our past history.

“We honestly wish no harm to the South or its people; we honestly wish them all benefit. We will defend her coast; we will guard her inland border from all vexations from without; and in good faith, in earnest friendship, in fealty to the Constitution, and in fellowship with the States, we will, and with growing earnestness to the end, fulfil every just duty, every honorable agreement, and every generous act within the limits of truth and honor; all that and no more—no more though the heavens fall; no more if States unclasp their hands; no more if they raise up violence against us—NO MORE! We have gone to the end.”

He did not agree with Mr. Lincoln in his hope that the South would be satisfied by the careful explanations given in his inaugural, nor with Mr. Seward in his expectation that the difficulty would be settled in ninety days; but he did believe with all his heart that God was in the work, and that the trouble would be settled some day, and that it would be settled right. In the turmoil of that turbulent time his mind was kept in perfect peace, because it was stayed on God.

The Republican party was charged with having brought about this unhappy state of the country. This charge he answers in a sermon preached January 4, 1861, the day appointed by President Buchanan for Fasting and Prayer:

“What is the errand of this day? Why are we observing a sad Sabbath? a day of humiliation? a day of supplication? It is for the strangest reason the world ever heard. It is because the spirit of liberty has so increased and strengthened among us that the government is in danger of being overthrown! There never before was such an occasion for fasting, humiliation, and prayer! Other nations have gone through revolutions for their liberties; we are on the eve of a revolution to put down liberty! Other people have thrown off their governments because too oppressive; ours is to be destroyed, if at all, because it is too full of liberty, too full of freedom. There never was such an event before in history.... Meanwhile we have had no one to stand up for order. Those who should have spoken in decisive authority have been—afraid! Severer words have been used; it is 308enough for me to say only that in a time when God, and providence, and patriotism, and humanity demanded courage, they had no response but fear. The heart has almost ceased to beat, and this government is like to die for want of pulsations at the centre. While the most humiliating fear paralyzes one part of the government, the most wicked treachery is found in other parts of it.”

So closes in shame and fear the second era of the great conflict.

“Buchanan’s Fast” marks the lowest point of degradation the government of the United States ever reached—a point of abject fear of the consequences of its own sins, of feeble persistence in them, and of cowardice in applying the remedy for its trouble.

Instead of abandoning its policy of falsehood and injustice, and making a manly use of the means still at hand to avert the threatening dangers, it held to its course, declared that it could do nothing more under the Constitution than to advise and remonstrate with treason, and made a frantic appeal to the Christians of the land to plead with Jehovah to save it from the inevitable consequences of its folly and wickedness.

It was a failure. The Call of the President to his kind of Fast awakened little response from the people. Another Proclamation was ringing in their ears. It was that of the old prophet uttered centuries before. “Is not this the Fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?”

This Fast of the Lord was rapidly approaching, and for it the people were getting ready.

War Begun—Firing upon Fort Sumter—“The American Eagle as you want it”—Death of Col. Ellsworth—Equips his Sons—Personal Feeling yields to Patriotism—His House a Store-House of Military Supplies—Sends a Regiment as his Substitute—Our National Flag—The Camp, its Dangers and Duties—Bull Run—Becomes Editor of the Independent—Salutatory—The Trent Affair—Fight, Tax—Soldiers or Ferrets—Characteristics as an Editor—One Nation, one Constitution, one Starry Banner—McClellan Safe, and Richmond too—Mildly Carrying on War—The Root of the Matter—The only Ground—A Queer Pulpit—President’s Proclamation of Emancipation—Let come what will—Close of the Third Era.

For five months the daily papers had borne for their prominent headlines, “The National Crisis,” “Pro-Slavery Rebellion,” “Pro-Slavery Revolution,” “The War-Cloud.” At length the issue of April 12, 1861, was headed, “The War Commenced: The first Gun fired by Fort Moultrie against Fort Sumter”; the next day, “Fort Sumter Fallen.”

Mr. Beecher was lecturing in Cincinnati when the tidings came North of the bombardment of Fort Sumter. The committee who had charge of the lecture were alarmed, and, remembering the old pro-slavery riots of thirty years before, declared that it would be unsafe for him to deliver his lecture. He told them that to give that lecture was his object in coming to Cincinnati, and do it he should; if not in a hall, then on the public street. With many misgivings on their part, he was permitted to go ahead, but so great was the fear of a riot that few attended. That night he turned his steps homeward. Eager to learn his opinion of the matter, we met him on the doorsteps. His oldest son, having left his position up the river, had stopped at a recruiting station on Broadway, already opened, and enlisted, and had then come home. Fearing something of the kind, the mother gave strict commands that he should not leave the house until his father’s return—a command which he was the more ready to obey since the business had already been attended to. Naturally he felt some little solicitude as to what his father should say, and his 310first words were: “Father, may I enlist?” and was answered: “If you don’t I’ll disown you.”

The next day was Sunday. The report of his sermon was headed thus: “Henry Ward Beecher on the Crisis: ‘What will you do, stand still or go forward?’

“The good people of Brooklyn have shared with us all the fears and anxiety of the past weeks. Yesterday there was, if possible, a more dense mass of human beings than usual packed within the walls of Plymouth Church, and a more than ordinary curiosity on the part of strangers, and a more than customary solemnity pervading the congregation. It was manifestly the belief of all there that the pastor would not fail to improve the occasion by preaching to the people of this age upon the duties of the present trying hour, and that he would deal with so grand a subject in a manner befitting its character, its importance, and its universal occupation of the American mind. Nor were they disappointed. Mr. Beecher delivered a sermon from the text, ‘Speak to the children of Israel that they go forward.’”

The above appeared in one of the daily papers. We have not time to give the synopsis of the reporter. The sermon was a careful review of the present condition of affairs and a sober counting the cost of both advance and retreat.

“Peace can be had by two-thirds of the nation yielding to the one-third; by legalizing the right of any discontented community to rebel; by changing our charter of universal freedom into a charter of deliberate oppression; by becoming partners in slavery and ratifying this gigantic evil; by surrendering all right of discussion, of debate or criticism. On these terms,” he said, “we may have peace.

“You can have your American eagle as you want it. If, with the South, you will strike out his eyes, then you shall stand well with Mr. Davis and Mr. Stephens, of the Confederate States; if, with the Christians of the South, you will pluck off his wings, you shall stand well with the Southern churches; and if, with the new peacemakers that have risen up in the North, you will pull out his tail-feathers, you shall stand well with the Society for the Promotion of National Unity! But when you have stricken out his eyes, so that he can no longer see; when you have plucked off his wings, so that he can no longer fly; and when you have pulled out his guiding tail-feathers, so that he can no longer steer himself, 311but rolls in the dirt, a mere buzzard—then will he be worth preserving? Such an eagle it is that they mean to depict upon the banner of America.

”... So far as I myself am concerned, I utterly abhor peace on any such grounds. Give me war redder than blood and fiercer than fire, if this terrific infliction is necessary that I may maintain my faith in God, in human liberty, my faith of the fathers in the instruments of liberty, my faith in this land as the appointed abode and chosen refuge of liberty for all the earth! War is terrible, but that abyss of ignominy is yet more terrible!“

He then pointed out the steps that must be taken in the going forward. They were, deepening and cleansing our convictions, making them more earnest and religious; drawing the lines; cherishing feelings of benevolence, and aiming at a peace built on foundations of God’s immutable truth, so solid that nothing can reach to unsettle it.

To show the spirit which he cherished in those days, we cannot do better than give one of the familiar lecture-room discussions which were so frequent between him and his people. It was immediately after the death of Colonel Ellsworth, which took place May 21, 1861:

”Ques. Will you please explain one point? I am so much a natural man as not to be able to obey the injunction which calls upon me to love my enemies; and when I stand on Broadway in New York, and see men in regiments which are bound for the field of battle, having been taken from their homes, their wives, their children, and all that is dear to them on earth, by the conduct of miscreants, I cannot understand how you can have such feelings as you express. I wish you would speak on that subject.”

“I have no doubt that the brother feels just as he says he does, and I have no doubt that I do not feel a bit so. When I consider the interests of God’s advancing kingdom of justice, and judgment, and mercy, and purity, and truth, and liberty, I think that all the things in the earth are of no value at all in the comparison, and that the earth might melt with fervent heat, the elements dissolve, and the globe vanish away rather than that this kingdom should not prevail. ‘Let God be true, but every man a liar.’ Let the nations perish, let everything go, but let the eternal treasures of God—truth, liberty, mercy, judgment, and 312purity—be preserved. I feel lifted up to a sovereign height of inspiration when I conceive of the majesty of these treasures, effluent from the heart of God, which He is seeking to embody in our time, in our earth, in this nation. Therefore, when I see justice put down I feel like a lion. When I see a great moral principle overborne there are no bounds to my indignation. When I see a great humanity trodden under foot I long to be a champion for it. And when I look on the face of an ignorant, erring, wicked multitude, I think of a great many things besides....

“For the sake of these great principles I would give my life as quick as I would pour out a glass of water; or I will do what is harder than that—I will keep it and use it for forty years, if God spares it, increasing its toil every year. I will make any sacrifice or perform any labor for the sake of a moral principle. But when I look at the South, other feelings besides those of vengeance are excited in me. Every one of those traitors is as wicked as you think, and more. The Floyds, the Davises, the Toombses, the Rhetts, and all such as they, are more wicked than we know; and yet the Lord Jesus Christ is the Saviour held up for every such one. They are all immortal, they are all, like myself, pilgrims toward the bourne of the eternal. And when I think how many ignorant creatures are led by those base men to do wicked things, half of the wickedness of which they do not know, I feel compassion for them and am sorry for them. If they array themselves against justice it is necessary that they should be overborne; but not one blow more than is necessary for the defence of the principle assailed should be struck. We are not authorized to inflict vengeance. ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore, if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.’ About the use of every single sword and spear and ball needful to assert a divine principle there should be no squeamishness. I am for war just so far as it is necessary to vindicate a great moral truth. But one particle of violence beyond that is a flagrant treason against the law of love. And I can say to-night that I would go to war with every State in the Southern Confederacy, if called of God to join the army, and would hold them to the conflict till the cause of right was vindicated; and that I could, at the same time, pray for 313those misguided men as easily as to-night I can pray for my own babes. I am as sorry for them as for any set of men in the world. I do not think I utter a prayer on any morning that I do not pray for them, and that God does not see my feeling of tenderness and sorrow toward them. And that is not all. I regard them as citizens yet. I love this whole country. I love its past and its prospective history. God do so to me, and more also, if I ever cease to feel for them all, misguided though they be, as anxiously as for my own kin and brethren. We cannot afford to be very critical with wickedness.

“However, there are some difficulties involved in this question. Colonel Ellsworth, who has just been murdered by one of these ‘miscreants’ of whom you speak, I knew well. I was thinking of my own sensations when I walked over from New York after hearing the sad news. Why, I was forty feet high! I was scared, I grew so fast. I walked so lordly that every step seemed to have the weight of a mountain; yet I did not feel the touch of the earth. For one hour I think I had enough volume of feeling to have swept away a continent. I was almost frightened at the turbulent and swelling tide within me, and I said: ‘Suppose my Master should come and say: My child, what are you doing with such feelings? Where is My teaching? What are you taking on yourself My supreme attribute for? “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”’ Is it not charming how these texts will exorcise the devil? I put that passage on my head as a crown, and I have felt as peaceful as a lamb ever since. And although it was very base and wicked for that man to murder Colonel Ellsworth as he did, I can say that had he not expiated his crime, and had the victim been my brother, I could still have forgiven him and prayed for him.

“Now, my brethren, I am going to fight this battle right straight through from beginning to end, and not lose my Christian feelings either. I am going to stick close to my Saviour. And, with regard to the past, I am not sorry for one sermon that I have preached among you, or that I have preached during the last twenty years of my life. If the question were put to me to-night, ‘When you look back upon your public life and see what you have done to bring about the present issue, are you not sorry for the ground you have taken?’ I would say, No. I bless God for every word I have spoken and every influence I have exerted 314in that direction. Knowing all that was to be, I would do over again all that I have done if the same state of things existed, only my little finger should be as heavy as my loins have been.

“Now that the time of conflict has come, we must accept it. I mean to go through it, and you shall; and I pray God that the whole anointed Church at the North may, bearing the banner of Christ along with the banner of our country. The stars over us shall not be brighter and purer than those that we carry into this very conflict. We have had examples enough to know that even in such a desperate case as civil war a man may be a Christian. I thank God that praying men have gone into the army from this church. Every day and night there is a prayer-meeting in our camp, and there will be to the end. And I believe that among our soldiers are those who, if they saw the bitterest and most blasphemous of the enemy suffering and dying, would relieve their sufferings by kind offices and soothe their last moments by comforting words. God grant that it may be so, and that, both in the service of the country and in the service of the Lord Jesus Christ, they may be true soldiers!”

It is impossible to describe, or even, in our time, to conceive, the fervor of patriotism that followed the firing upon Fort Sumter. Patriotic meetings were held in nearly every village of the North, and the raising of flag-poles with their accompanying exercises was the order of the day. A monster mass-meeting was held in Union Square, New York, over which John A. Dix presided, and where the flag which had been lowered at Sumter was displayed. The attack on the Massachusetts regiment in Baltimore as it hastened to the defence of Washington deepened and increased the excitement. The ranks of military companies already organized were speedily filled, and the young men met, in most of our Northern cities, week by week for military drill. A squad of these was formed in Brooklyn. Some fifteen of us wanted to go to the front, and offered ourselves to one of the New York regiments, but the offer was refused with thanks. Their ranks were full and they had no place for us. Hearing of this, Mr. Beecher, who took a deep interest in this whole matter and used to attend our drills, proposed that two of us, his own son and one who expected to belong to his family, should join a cavalry regiment then being enlisted in New York. He gave us each a horse, brought us home our equipment of 315pistols, bowie-knives, etc., and, the next day, went with us to New York to see us enlist; but the enlisting officer had received notice from Washington the day before to accept no more recruits—cavalry regiments were not thought to be necessary for the ninety days’ struggle; and so we were refused. One of us went to Riker’s Island, and, after a month of waiting, was able to get into service; the other, having just finished his theological course, and having for weeks been importuned by a church to become its pastor, concluded that it was God’s will that he should preach, left the city, and went to work.

There was great variety of work to be done. No need now of efforts to arouse the public mind—the firing upon Fort Sumter had done that; no need now of urging men to the front—the young men of the nation had formed into companies and regiments faster than the government was willing to accept them. Illinois asked permission to furnish all the men that were required. But another work pressed upon heart and hand. Homes at the North were being made desolate, not only by the absence but by the death of their loved ones. Tidings began to reach us of what afterwards seemed skirmishes, but were important battles in those days—Big Bethel, Newport News, and others; and the list of the dead, small to what it afterwards became, carried with it then, as always, sorrow and heart-break. The bodies of fallen sons and brothers, picked up on the battle-field or gathered from the hospitals, covered with the stars and stripes, were being borne through the streets of our cities on the way to bereaved homes, and the people needed comforting. Then it was that the words of one perfectly assured of the justice of the cause, that it was of God, and that those who upheld their country’s flag were doing His work, and who viewed life and death as only and equally desirable when they accomplished His will, rang out like the resurrection challenge of St. Paul: “O death! where is thy sting? O grave! where is thy victory?”

In a sermon preached May 26, 1861, when but the first mutterings of the storm had been heard and the first splashes of rain were felt, he says: “He whose remains are to pass to-day, amid many tears, through yonder city, lived long though he died early. Why? Because he lived to a moral purpose. Because he has given his name to patriotism. Millions of men shall live four-score years and shall not leave any such memorial as he has left. 316He had lived long enough. Any man that can give the whole weight of his being and his heart-life to a great truth or cause has lived long enough. Measure him by the higher and not by the lower standard. Do not say that he has lost days, that he has lost coming honors, that he lost pleasure. He lost nothing. He gained everything. He gained glory, and paid his life for it in such a way as to take on immortality.”

One very intimate with him in those days says: “I do not think that he spent a moment in solicitude for the fate of those who were at the front, not even of his own flesh and blood. Everything seemed swallowed up in his zeal for his country, and for her he was ready to sacrifice everything without complaint or hesitation.”

“My oldest son is in the army, and shall I read with trembling anxiety the account of every battle to see if he is slain? I gave him to the Lord, and I shall not take him back and I will not worry and fret myself about him. I will trust in God though He slay not only him but me also; and all I have I put on the same ground—I try to, sometimes not succeeding and sometimes succeeding a little. My God, this Christ Emmanuel—God with me—has sustained and comforted me in care and trouble, and taken away my fear and put hope in its place, and I will look to Him still; and if there are any here that have carried burdens, and whose faces are wrinkled with care, I beseech of you to try living by faith in a present Saviour that loves you and ordains all things, and says that everything shall work for your good if you love God.”

Among the things that occupied his time and called forth all his energies was the equipment of the Fourteenth Long Island Regiment. His home at 124 Columbia Heights became a store-house of military goods and a place of consultation for men interested in the events that were taking place; Plymouth Church became a rendezvous for regiments passing to the front, and the church parlors a workshop where the women and maidens of the church, under the direction of Mrs. Beecher, met daily to sew and knit and pack for the soldiers. He told Mrs. Beecher to use all his salary in this direction, except such as was absolutely necessary for running the household. She did this, and added to the amount by personal solicitation from families and merchants, until an immense sum was raised and expended.

317While many men sent single substitutes, Mr. Beecher determined to be represented in the war by a whole regiment; and so, after helping to fit out two regiments, he took upon himself the entire burden of equipping a new one, called “The Long Island Volunteers,” afterwards the Sixty-seventh New York. This regiment would never have had any existence but for the labors of Mr. and Mrs. Beecher, and the members of the church whom they interested in it. Their eldest son, Henry Barton Beecher, joined it and was made a lieutenant. In those days the government had plenty of men and very little money, and therefore declined to accept this regiment for many weeks after it was organized, during which time the entire expense of feeding and clothing the men was borne by subscriptions raised by Mr. Beecher. It was not until after the battle of Bull Run, at the end of July, 1861, that the regiment was even in form accepted, and not until much later that it was actually mustered into the national service.

In those days of multiplied and harassing labors Mr. Beecher did not lose his hope, his cheerfulness, nor even his mirthfulness. He had a refuge to which he constantly fled when the pressure became too heavy. He had also the power of seeing the humorous side of many common or even tragic events, and drawing from them laughter as well as tears. The flowers, too, and the clouds had their message for him. He kept the channels of his soul wide open on every side to receive, and became a fountain of perpetual inspiration to others.

At this time, while the route through Baltimore was closed against our troops on their way to Washington, he preached to the “Brooklyn Fourteenth,” on the eve of their departure to the front, upon “Our National Flag.” After giving the history of our banner he more particularly addressed the soldiers before him:

“And now God speaks by the voice of His providence, saying, ‘Lift again that banner! Advance it full and high!’ To your hands God and your country commit that imperishable trust. You go forth self-called, or rather called by the trust of your countrymen and by the Spirit of your God, to take that trailing banner out of the dust and out of the mire, and lift it again where God’s rains can cleanse it, and where God’s free air can cause it to unfold and stream as it has always floated before 318the wind. God bless the men that go forth to save from disgrace the American flag!

“Accept it, then, in all its fulness of meaning. It is not a painted rag. It is a whole national history. It is the Constitution. It is the government. It is the free people that stand in the government on the Constitution. Forget not what it means; and, for the sake of its ideas rather than its mere emblazonry, be true to your country’s flag. By your hands lift it; but let your lifting it be no holiday display. It must be advanced ‘because of the truth.’

“That flag must go to the capital of this nation; and it must not go hidden, not secreted, not in a case or covering, but full high displayed, bright as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners! For a single week that disgraceful work, that shameful circuit, may be needful; but the way from New England, the way from New York, the way from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, to Washington, lies right through Baltimore, and that is the way the flag must and shall go! [Enthusiastic cheers.] But that flag, borne by ten thousand and thrice ten thousand hands, from Connecticut, from Massachusetts (God bless the State and all her men!), from shipbuilding Maine, from old granite New Hampshire, from Vermont of Bennington and Green-Mountain-Boy patriotism, from Rhode Island, not behind any in zeal and patriotism, from New York, from Ohio, from Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Delaware, and the other loyal States—that flag must be carried, bearing every one of its insignia, to the sound of the drum and the fife, into our national capital, until Washington shall seem to be a forest in which every tree supports the American banner!

“And it must not stop there. The country does not belong to us from the Lakes only to Washington, but from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The flag must go on. The land of Washington shall see Washington’s flag again. The land that sits in darkness, and in which the people see no light, shall yet see light dawn and liberty flash from the old American banner! It must see Charleston again, and float again over every fort in Charleston harbor. It must go further, to the Alligator State, and stand there again. And sweeping up through all plantations and over all fields of sugar and rice and tobacco, and every other thing, it must be found in every State till you touch the Mississippi; and, 319bathing in its waters, it must go across and fill Texas with its sacred light. Nor must it stop when it floats over every one of the States. That flag must stand, bearing its whole historic spirit and original meaning, in every Territory of this nation!”

Other sermons of similar character followed. “The Camp, its Dangers and Duties,” was one:

“For any one that is going forth to meet the temptations of camp life I had almost said I would sum up in one single word of remembrance a talisman of safety—temperance, absolute temperance.... The men that are dangerous in camps are not bloated drunkards, shameless gamblers, and such as they. But an accomplished officer, a brilliant fellow, who knows the world, who is gentle in language, who understands all the etiquettes of society, who is fearless of God, who believes nothing in religion, who does not hesitate, with wit and humor, to jeer at sacred things, who takes an infernal pleasure in winding around his finger the young about him, who is polished and wicked, and walks as an angel of light to tempt his fellow-men, as Satan did to tempt our first parents—if there be in camp such a one, he is the dangerous man.

“There ought to be a bold stand taken in favor of virtue by the good in each one of the various companies. If there is not such a stand taken in Company C of the Fourteenth Regiment, I shall be ashamed of my preaching.”

He was constantly invited to lecture, and almost any sum was offered to secure his services. These, as we may well conceive, were mostly patriotic addresses upon the great subjects that were then burning in the minds of the American people.

We remember well his having a course at Providence, Rhode Island, the third of which was delivered Monday, after the heavy work of the day previous, and when he took the train he had not touched pen to paper nor given it a moment’s thought; but his mind and heart were fully awake, and the resources of a lifetime of thought and labor were at his command.

The battle of Bull Run, which was fought in July, as is well known, was the first battle of the war of really national importance. The result was sobering and humiliating to the North. On the following Sunday evening Mr. Beecher preached a sermon upon “God in National Affairs.” After tracing His way in the history of the nation, he says:

320“The battle is well begun. If I consult my pride, if I consult my vanity, I fain would never have seen our banners dip; and yet, if I consult a larger wisdom, I know not but that the best thing that can befall us is that humiliation which shall teach us not to rely so much on words and cheers and newspaper campaigns. A defeat just sufficient to make us feel that we must fall upon the interior stores of manhood, that we must have faith in God, that we must set aside everything but a solemn purpose and an earnest consecration of ourselves to this work which God has given us to do—such a defeat cannot but be beneficial.”

And so it proved. The battle of Bull Run awoke the North from its dream of easy conquest, and thenceforth she took up the war in earnest.

In his Thanksgiving sermon in November of that year, upon “Modes and Duties of Emancipation,” he shows the conservatism of his belief and his confidence in the national authority if rightly used—“This conflict must be carried on through our institutions, not over them”—and his view of the great forces engaged—“While preparations for this conflict have been going on God has poured money into our coffers and taken it away from those who might use it to our harm. He is holding back France and England, and saying to all nations, ‘Appoint the bounds! Let none enter the lists to interfere while those gigantic warriors battle for victory! Liberty and God, and slavery and the devil, stand over against each other, and let no man put hand or foot into the ring till they have done battle unto death!’ Amen! Even so, Lord Almighty. It is Thy decree, and it shall stand! And when the victory shall come, not unto us, not unto us, but—in the voice of thrice ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, of ransomed ones, mingled with Thine earthly children’s gladness—unto Thee shall be the praise and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.”

During all these years, almost from the time he came to Brooklyn, Mr. Beecher had been fortunate in having a channel of communication with the public, in general so in harmony with his own views and spirit as the New York Independent. In its second number appears an extract from a sermon of his, followed by frequent contributions from his pen called “Star Papers,” and for the last three years a sermon in full upon the second 321page. He is now called to its head. In the issue of December 19, 1861, appears his “Salutatory.” Since in this he gives, in brief, his conception of the office and importance of the religious newspaper, it is given in full:

“The undersigned has to-day assumed the editorial management of the Independent. This will not involve any change in the principles, the purposes, or general spirit of the paper. The Independent was founded to illustrate and to defend the truths and doctrines of the Christian religion; to employ them as the authoritative standards by which to estimate and influence events, measures, and men; to infuse a spirit of truth and humanity into the affairs of this nation; to give aid and encouragement to every judicious scheme of Christian benevolence. It has sought to leaven with the Christian spirit all the great elements of our civilization. These were the aims. The results are upon record.

“For the future, studying a catholic sympathy with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ, and seeking to promote concord among all Christians of every name, the Independent will still continue explicitly and firmly to hold and to teach those great cardinal doctrines of religion that are substantially held in common by the Congregational orthodox churches of New England and by the Presbyterian churches of our whole land. But, as heretofore, this will be done for the promotion of vital godliness rather than for sectarianism.

“The Independent will not deviate from that application of Christian truth to all public questions which has thus far characterized its course. While seeking to promote religious feeling, as such, and to incite and supply devotional wants, it will not forget that there is an ethical as well as an emotive life in true religion. We shall therefore assume the liberty of meddling with every question which agitates the civil or Christian community, according to our own best discretion.

“The editorial profession, with the progress of popular intelligence, has assumed an importance second to no other. It may unite in it the elements of power hitherto distributed in the several professions, and add, besides, many that have belonged to no other calling. He who knows the scope and power of the press need desire no higher office than the editorial.

“In that silent realm of influences out of which proceed the 322actions of men and the events of history, the editor is the invisible leader. Votes cannot raise him higher. His pen is more than a sceptre. Profoundly impressed with such a responsibility, desiring to honor God in the welfare of men, we ask the sympathy of good men and the remembrance of all who pray.

At this time the excitement growing out of the capture of Mason and Slidell on board the British steamer Trent, by Commodore Wilkes on the San Jacinto, was at its height. News had just reached this country of the bitter feeling awakened by “the outrage,” of the shipment of troops to Canada, and other hasty preparations by Great Britain to avenge the insult to her flag. And Mr. Beecher’s first editorial bears the somewhat ominous title of “War with England.”

As we might expect, it is both temperate and defiant in language and tone:

“We have no idea that there will be any war with that power. England has a peculiar practical wisdom in affairs which touch her own material interests. Her folly will be expended in words; her wisdom reserved for actions. It is not her interest to go to war with the Northern States in the interest of the Southern States. There is no probability that she will allow herself, whatever she has done in other days, to be found fighting for slavery against freedom....

“There is no desire on our part for so unnatural a war. To avert it we shall be willing to yield anything but honor. Our hands are sufficiently full. To have a British fleet thundering at our sea-doors, while the volcano was yet pouring lava through our Southern States, would be a little more business on hand than could be attended to with that thoroughness which our people desire in all warlike enterprises.

“Yet should England force us into war, terrible and atrocious as that would be, America is determined to put her in the wrong before the world. If we have transgressed any law of nations; if we have, indeed, violated any right of England; if we have, to the width of a hair, passed beyond the line of our own proper duty and right, we shall, upon suitable showing, need no menace to make ample reparation. We shall do it for the satisfaction of our own sense of justice. But if we are right, if we have done 323right, all the threatenings in the world will not move this people from their steadfastness....

“Our wish is to unite with England in a race of civilization. But if she will fight, we must.”

Some idea of the variety and character of the work he did at this time may be gained by a look at his editorials found in the Independent of January 16, 1862, the third week of his administration as editor. The first is “Our Help from Above,” in which he directs all burdened hearts to the great sources and divine methods of consolation. “The nearer our thoughts come to the infinite and the divine the more power have we over our troubles. The act of consolation is, to a great degree, the act of inspiration.”

The raising, equipping, and feeding such vast armies as, it was now seen, would be required for the prosecution of the war, awakened in the minds of thoughtful men a question scarcely second in importance to any. By what plan or on what system shall the money required for these large and expensive enterprises be secured? His second editorial upon this page takes up this matter under the head of “A Word from the People to Congress,” in which he urges the fearless imposition of taxes sufficient to carry on the war, and justifies such a course upon the simple basis of honesty. The article opens with this sentence, “Taxation and national honesty are now synonymous,” and closes with this, “Every honest man in America ought to send to Washington one message in two words, Fight, Tax.”

How to treat the black men that came into our lines, or were liberated by the advance of our armies, was another of the pressing questions at this time, and one concerning which there was a great difference of opinion. He treated this subject in a column article on this page, entitled “Men, not Slaves.” The position which he held, and advocated with great force and clearness, is given in this sentence: “One thing is plain—one thing as a starting-point admits of no doubt, needs no hesitation: let us forget that these blacks ever were slaves, and remember only that they are men. With this as our first principle we cannot go far wrong.”

This money-raising was a matter of so great importance that he devoted another column to it on this same page, on the “Duty of the Hour.” In the first article he sent a message to 324Congress; in this he speaks to the Christian public: “Whether the great impending patriotic tax shall be a moral triumph and a testimony to the religious life of this people will depend largely upon the conduct of Christian men and the action of Christian teachers.... There seems to have been very little education of the consciences of Christian men to the duty of a cheerful support of government by their property. Even Christian men are tempted to give grudgingly, selfishly, meanly. The nobler sentiments of the heart have been allowed but little scope in this part of citizen duty.

“Is the Gospel worn out? Are ministers of the Gospel less manly and Christian than in the days of the fathers? Has the American pulpit forgotten that its place is in the van—that it leads, not follows, the camp?

“Every church should have a public sentiment developed within it which shall make this national tax almost a free-will offering. Let Christian laymen take counsel together. Let the leading men of towns and neighborhoods not only set a good example, but make it their duty to cheer and inspirit the slow and reluctant. Let Christian men everywhere, and in all things, seek to inspire the public mind with an earnest willingness to discharge this great debt which we are called to pay for national unity, national safety, and national glory.”

In those days of dress-parades in our largest army, and “all quiet on the Potomac,” men chafed continually over what appeared to be inaction and timidity on the part of the government at Washington. This found expression in still another article by this same pen upon this same page, “Courage and Enterprise”:

“There was never a time when timidity was so nearly allied to rashness, and courage to the highest prudence, as now. We have every element of national prosperity except the courage to use our power. Standing on a centre and whirling around with sound and celerity may make a top, but never an administration. Courage to see and accept the whole national danger; courage to see and to accept the thoroughest remedy; courage to ask the people for all that is needed, without a thought of refusal; courage to use the means, willingly afforded, so as to put the whole strength of this nation into every blow; courage to dash in pieces every enemy, without stopping to consider just how we shall mend the pieces afterward—this is the very critical prudence of good administration.

325“Since war is upon us, let us have courage to make war.

“There is no money needed, there are no men wanted, there is no enthusiasm that the North will not give with eager gladness, if only SOMEBODY will speak to the nation such words as the fathers spoke! Then men LOVED liberty! The nation suffered for a principle! What are we doing now? Are we raising moss on cannon-wheels, or are we fighting? Is it husbandry or war that is going on? Are we to starve Southern armies or conquer them? Do we mean to put down rebellion by soldiers or ferrets?”

These editorials showed certain features which were as characteristic of his work in the editor’s chair as they were in the pulpit and upon the platform; the first of these was this: he chose his subjects from among the things which at that time affected and interested the people. This he did, not simply because he could then get the ear of the public, nor because these were in themselves the largest or most important matters, but from a deep religious conviction that these present questions and present interests were a part of God’s providence, by which and through which He was accomplishing His purposes; and that in treating these matters he was working together with Him. He believed thoroughly in God’s action in common affairs and through the impulses given to common men. This conviction made him a leader of the people without bringing him into bondage to them. It gave him the kind of leadership to which he attained: not of the abstract thinker in the movements of a hundred years hence, but of the practical man of affairs in the battles of to-day. This gave him the boldness that he never failed to display. Confident that he was moving in harmony with God’s purpose and at His own appointed time, he waited for no gathering of numbers, but pushed on alone, if necessary, with an assurance born of faith. Storms and confusion did not daunt him, because he recognized in these but the necessary methods by which the Almighty carries out His designs in the moral and spiritual as in the material world.

Another characteristic feature was seen in his treatment of the subject in hand. He uniformly regarded it from the standpoint of the law of Christ’s kingdom on the earth—“Bear ye one another’s burdens.” This insured harmony in his policy through all changes of events around him, and ultimately secured 326success. All the forces of the universe, because created and administered by the Saviour of mankind, were on the side not only of justice and truth but of kindness, forbearance, and helpfulness, and must in time prevail. So deep was his conviction of the direct and universal application of the law of this kingdom that he instinctively took this side, and linked his action and his destiny with its fortunes, when prudence and policy would seem to dictate a different course, with a sublime confidence in its final victory.

A third characteristic was this: He wrote so as to awaken inspiration, to stir men’s hearts to feel. It was not enough that men believed a truth; that was nothing unless they felt it. His words must take hold, they must excite the emotions and move men to action, or they were a failure.

Besides the editorial articles referred to on this one page, there was his sermon in this same issue occupying more than four columns of the second page of the paper. It was upon the Divine Government, and moved along on these lofty heights: “We believe that God is in His own world and that He governs it by His personal will; that this government includes nations, families, and individuals; that it aims at the highest good and the everlasting good of sentient and intelligent creatures; that it is one which admits the action of our minds upon God’s and the action of God’s upon ours; that it has in it a place for all human yearnings and strivings and longings.” “I bring you a Gospel that will never wear out, a Gospel which is for ever fresh, and that is, Emmanuel—God with us: God with you, in you, around you, loving you, bearing with you, forgiving you, helping you, watching over you, taking you up and carrying you as the parent takes up and carries the little child.”

The first anniversary Sunday of the attack on Fort Sumter was marked by a sermon on the “Success of American Democracy,” the tone of which may be judged by the following passage:

“‘We will give every dollar that we are worth, every child that we have, and our own selves; we will bring all that we are and all that we have, and offer them up freely—but this country shall be one and undivided. We will have one Constitution and one liberty, and that universal.’ The Atlantic shall sound it and the Pacific shall echo it back, deep answering to deep, 327and it shall reverberate from the Lakes on the North to the unfrozen Gulf on the South—‘One nation, one Constitution, one starry banner!’ Hear it, England!—one country, and indivisible. Hear it, Europe!—one people, and inseparable. One God; one hope; one baptism; one Constitution; one government; one nation; one country; one people—cost what it may, we will have it!”

The summer of 1862 was, perhaps, a period of as great discouragement to the North as any during the war. After months of preparation and wearisome delays, with the grandest army that had ever been gathered on this continent, McClellan had made his advance against Richmond, only to entrench, retreat, and at last to be hurled back defeated and shattered. It was when these terrible disasters were beginning to be understood and their true significance appreciated that Mr. Beecher’s editorials in the Independent rose to their highest point of power and influence. They were directed to the people and to the government as occasion demanded, but always with such a grouping of facts, with so clear an appreciation of the situation, and with so great earnestness of appeal and power of denunciation that they must be reckoned among the loyal forces. We give the titles and a few sentences from several of that time, that their general character may be understood. On July 3, 1862, we have one upon “The Great Duty”:

“In another column will be found the President’s call for 300,000 more soldiers. These, and as many more if needed, can be raised. The North has not changed her mind. The integrity of this nation, the authority of its Constitution over all its original territory, will be maintained at every hazard and at whatever expense.

“It is our duty to the nation and to the family of nations to make a slaveholders’ rebellion so odious and disastrous that it shall stand to all ages like Sodom and Gomorrah. Whatever it may cost in men and money, the North is fully assured that for nothing else can money be so well spent, and for nothing nobler can men live, or, if need be, lay down their lives!

“The great duty now is to maintain a united North. No event can be more sure than the victory of this government over the slaveholders’ conspiracy, if the loyal States are united. But if secret feuds or open factions shall divide and paralyze the 328popular feeling, the cause will fail, or succeed only after long, wasting, and useless expenditures.”

In the next issue, July 10, he has an equally strong editorial upon “The Country’s Need.” The suppression of news, the failure to trust the people, the political intrigues at the capital, moved him to righteous and sorrowful indignation:

“Did the government frankly say to this nation, We are defeated? To this hour it has not trusted the people. It held back the news for days. Nor was the truth honestly told when outside information compelled it to say something. It is even to this hour permitting McClellan’s disaster to be represented as a piece of skilfully planned strategy! After the labor of two months, the horrible sickness of thousands of men poisoned in the swamps of the Chickahominy, the loss of probably more than ten thousand as noble fellows as ever lifted a hand to defend their country, McClellan, who was four miles from Richmond, finds himself twenty-five miles from the city, wagons burned, ammunition-trains blown up, parks of artillery captured, no entrenchments, and with an army so small that it is not pretended that he can reach Richmond! The public are infatuated. The papers that regaled us two weeks ago with visions of a Fourth of July in Richmond are now asking us to rejoice and acclaim—not at victory—but that we have just saved the army! McClellan is safe!—and Richmond too!

“The government, upon this disaster, procures the governors of the States to ask it to call for 300,000 more men. Why did not the President take the responsibility, plainly confess our disaster, say that we were within a hand-breadth of ruin, throw himself on the people? No. The people pay taxes, give their sons and brothers—but that is all. We are sick and weary of this conduct. We have a sacred cause, a noble army, good officers, and a heroic common people. But we are like to be ruined by an administration that will not tell the truth; that spends precious time in playing at President-making; that is cutting and shuffling the cards for the next great political campaign. Unless good men awake, unless the accursed silence is broken that has fallen on the people, unless the government is held sternly to its responsibility to the people, we shall dally through the summer, make brigadier-generals until autumn, build huge entrenchments, but fight no battles till they are forced upon us, and then we 329shall be called upon to celebrate our defeats or retreats as masterly strategies!

“We have a country. We have a cause. We have a people. Let all good men pray that God would give us a government!”

This is followed by one, July 17, on the “Patriotism of the People.” Its tone will be understood by these few sentences:

“There is no need of rousing the patriotism of the people. It is an inexhaustible quality. It underlies their very life. The government itself is buoyed up by it, and rides upon it, like a ship upon the fathomless ocean.

“No. It is the government that needs rousing. We do not need meetings on the Hudson, but motion on the Potomac. It is not in Boston, or Buffalo, or Cincinnati, or New York that this case is to be settled, but in Washington. There is no use of concealing it. The people are beginning to distrust their rulers—not their good nature, their patriotism, their honesty, but their capacity for the exigency of military affairs. They know that in war an hour often carries a campaign in its hand. A day is a year. The President seems to be a man without any sense of the value of time. The people admire his disinterestedness. They believe him firm when he reaches decisions. But they perceive how long a period he requires to form judgments; how wide a circuit he takes of uncertainty and vacillation before he determines. In civil affairs, that can bear to wait, the people deem him among the best of our long line of Presidents. But it is war! Armies are perishing. Months are wasting. We are in the second year of rebellion. We have been just on the eve of doing something for sixteen months!

“The nation rose up in its majesty to punish rebellion. It put a magnificent army into the President’s hand. For one year that army was besieged in the capital!

“At length, this past spring, began the campaign in Virginia. The people gloried in the belief that the majesty of the government would be asserted. After four months’ campaign the armies of the United States are on the defensive! Not less than a hundred thousand men have been lost by death, wounds, sickness, and captivity; McClellan is cooped up on James River; Pope is collecting an army; and the country is to-day actually debating whether the enemy cannot strike a blow at Washington! Is this such a management as will confirm the confidence of the 330country in Mr. Lincoln’s conduct of the war? Do we need to ask why men are slow to volunteer? Does any man need to be told what the end of such things must be? This is not punishing rebellion; it is helping it....

“We speak plainly, sorrowfully, earnestly. An enemy of the Administration would have no right to speak so. We are friends—all the more because we speak out what millions think but do not utter, lest it might hinder the cause. But, unless some one speaks, there will soon be little cause left to hinder or to help.”

In the next issue, that of July 24, he has another two-column editorial upon “The Duty of To-day”:

“In the beginning of this great struggle the question among loyal men was, How shall we save this nation? One year of fighting and the question is, Whether we can save it? That is the question of to-day....

“The South has simplicity and unity of purpose. The North is uncertain which she wishes most—to subdue the rebellion, to leave slavery unharmed, or to have the right President at the next election!

“The South adjourns every question and postpones every interest in favor of arms. The North is busy with conflicting schemes and interests—and is also mildly carrying on war.

“Does anybody doubt the result of such a course? It is so certain that it is not worth our while to waste another man or another dollar! Either the Administration policy should instantly change or the war cease! It is not more vigor so much as a different internal idea. If the Administration cannot be disenchanted of the traditional policy that has grown up during the heartless, timid, compromising era of the last half-century, and adopt the simple and straightforward policy that becomes a people striving for liberty and free institutions upon the American continent, then we are doomed! It is war that we are making—war first, war second, war wholly! It is not politics. It is not Constitution-making. It is not the decision of legal niceties. These are not the business of government, as toward the South. It is war, absolute, terrible, and immeasurable war!

“The South has organized on the fact of slavery, and fights on that issue, pure and simple. The North must organize on the doctrine of liberty, and fight right through on that issue, pure and simple.

331“The South sacrifices everything that conflicts with her central idea. The North must do the same. The South is not ashamed of slavery. The North must not be ashamed of liberty!

”... The government cannot any longer avoid choosing the issue that has been made up and thrust upon it—freedom or slavery. The time has come. So long as there was a chance of solving this question as a civil question it was wise to leave it, as far as possible, to the States concerned, and to employ the moral influences which change men’s minds. But slavery has become a military question. One year has changed all things. A remiss and vacillating policy of the Administration; the committing of the armies of the United States for a whole year to a man who thought he was at West Point giving a four years’ course of instruction to five hundred thousand men infinitely at leisure, has changed the relations and possibilities of things. It has taken slavery out of the realm of discussion and placed it in the arena of war. It must be settled by force....

“Nothing will unite this people like a bold annunciation of a moral principle. Let the American flag be lifted up by Mr. Lincoln, as was the brazen serpent, and let it be known that every man who looks upon it on this continent shall be free, and a tide of joy and irresistible enthusiasm will sweep away every obstacle. Let Mr. Lincoln decree it. The nation will do it!

“Such a policy would carry the conscience of the North; would kindle the enthusiasm for liberty, which is always the most potent of influences; would bring all the historic traditions of the old American struggle to enkindle the ardor of the young, who are to form our armies. It would brush away at one stroke a thousand hindrances, give simplicity and unity to our plans, and distinctness to our policy. It would end all threat of foreign intervention. Above all, it would give to the American armies that pillar of smoke by day and fire by night by which God the Emancipator led forth His people from bondage into liberty!”

In the next issue, July 31, he writes a two-column editorial upon “The Root of the Matter”:

“It is not enough that we increase our men and means. We shall never succeed until we accept the idea latent in this conflict. Slavery must be crushed. Liberty must have absolute and unquestioned dominion on this continent. We will not have oppression under the symbol of a sceptre or of a whip—neither exported 332from abroad nor sprouting from our own soil! This continent is dedicated to Liberty. It is the mission of this generation of men to establish free institutions from ocean to ocean. We sought to do it in peace. Since war has come, we will seek to take from its repulsiveness and horror by making it serve the noblest ends of human liberty. If it is for liberty upon a whole continent that we fight, then every son or brother that falls is a sacrificial victim. By his blood we ransom generations of men!

“The way to make the Administration see this truth is to see it ourselves. There is a kind of political mesmerism. Our rulers will partake of our sensations. What the people see the President will see. What the people taste will repeat itself on the President’s tongue.

“Let the sentence be spoken. Let all hindrances and hesitations end. Lift up the banner! And as the winds of war roll out its folds, let those letters shine out as if God had written them with heavenly light, ‘Universal Emancipation.’”

The next editorial, August 7, is upon “A Leader for the People.” These were the days of Pope and the disasters of the army, and the uncertainty and terror at Washington. Two columns of argument and appeal for more genuine enthusiasm for the great doctrines on which this government was founded close with a prayer, the only relief of a heart bursting with a mighty passion of sorrow and impatience:

“Great God, what a people hast Thou brought forth upon this continent! What love of liberty; what heroic love of law and institution; what courage, and constancy, and self-sacrifice hast Thou given them! And no man is found to lead this so great a nation! Be Thou Leader! Lord God of Hosts, hast Thou forgotten how to lead a people? There are no ages on Thy head! Years make Thee neither old nor weary! Behind Thy unwrinkled brow no care dwells! Teach this people to need no other leader but Thyself! Then, led by Thee, teach them to be all-sufficient for every deed of justice, and omnipotent for liberty!”

These are followed, August 14, by a three-column editorial upon “The Time has Come”:

“We have been made irresolute, indecisive, and weak by the President’s attempt to unite impossibilities; to make war and 333keep the peace; to strike hard and not hurt; to invade sovereign States and not meddle with their sovereignty; to put down rebellion without touching its cause; to bring an infuriated people into enforced union with their enemies, and to leave all their causes of quarrels unsettled and vigorous, and yet hope for future concord.

“Thus far the conservative North has been striving to conduct this war so as not to meddle with the so-called Southern right of slavery. But, in spite of every scruple, events have crowded men to the necessity of confiscation and emancipation. There is one more step. It is the last sublime step toward national safety and national Christian glory. It is immediate and universal emancipation!”

In the next issue, August 21, is another article, upon “The Only Ground,” of the same temper, urging the same plea:

“The President has the right and power to destroy slavery. Let him account to the civilized world for not doing it.”

And another August 28, upon “Reconstruction”:

“Since, then, the old Union is de facto ceased, and all the local rights lapsed by rebellion to the hands of the government, and it is to reconstruct the Union, would it be a stretch of authority in the government so to reconstruct it as to insure its perpetuity by purging out all possible cause of future discord? The President has the authority. He is exercising it every day. All that we ask is that he will look forward and not backward; that he will consider the nation of the future, and not mere precedents in the past.... To put down rebellion first, and attend to slavery afterwards, is letting two serpents uncoil that may as well be stricken through with one blow.”

The preacher’s pulpit is in perfect accord with the editor’s chair. In a sermon of July 27, 1862, he says: “God has been pleased to bring this nation at this time into great trials that are to test the faith of all true men. I think that we have not by a long way touched bottom yet. I think that the wind has not yet blown its fiercest. There are blacker clouds than those that have yet expended their fury. I cast no confidence away. I do not know that we are to succeed to-day or to-morrow; but we are going to succeed. I do not know that we are going to succeed in Virginia for the present, but we are a-going to succeed in America.America.

“When I die there will be a great many things that, if I have 334time to think of them, I may be sorry for. After I die there may be a great many inconsistencies, a great many sins, a great many unperformed duties that, when I behold them in retrospect, I shall regret. But I tell you that, whether in the passage of death, or at the gate of heaven, or before God’s eternal throne, I never expect to be sorry that I have preached so often and so strongly in behalf of those that were in bonds; that I have spoken, as I have had opportunity, for those that could not speak for themselves; that I have roused up, according to the measure of my influence, the whole community to vindicate the cause of God toward His oppressed ones. I shall not be sorry for that. I shall be sorry that I have not done more; but I never shall be sorry that I have done so much.

“And my faith in this cause was never so strong as it is now. I do not throw it away. I feel certain that if the will of God is done in this matter, though we may have to wait, we shall have great recompense of reward in waiting.

“May God inspire the hearts of our rulers by the right things! May God unite the hearts of this great people in right counsels and in right feelings! May God accept the offerings that we make of our children, of our brothers, of our neighbors, of everything that we have! Let us put them all on the altar of patriotism, knowing that in this case the altar of patriotism is the altar of God. He will accept the offering, and in His own time, by tokens infallible, He will reward our faith and bring us forth purged, purified, strengthened by the things which we have suffered.”

With all his earnestness he must have his laugh at a contemporary, “A Queer Pulpit”:

“We knew that the Journal of Commerce was famous upon statistics and prided itself upon its good literary taste. But we had no idea before of the powers of its rhetoric. We extract a figure from its issue of August 27 that should be commended to the directors of the New York Hospital:

“‘It is the voice of a glorious past which speaks to him, in the tones of the fathers whose graves are with us. It is the voice of the living nation, millions on millions of whom utter the same words we utter to-day. It is the voice of posterity, speaking from the womb of time, that calls on him to save the Constitution, which was made, not for the duration of a human life, but to be the 335blessing of all men and all nations until the end of thrones and earthly powers. That he will be faithful we do not for one instant doubt.’

“This is taking part in politics rather early. Constitutional studies must be pursued under difficulties in this case. But if posterity are so greatly stirred in their minds, there is nothing for it but for the President to write them a letter. He answered Horace Greeley. Surely he will heed the sufferings of posterity in such uncomfortable quarters.

“For ourselves, we cannot be too thankful that we are already born. We prefer open-air speaking. If the President don’t save the Constitution now, it is a hopeless case!”

In an editorial, September 11, upon “The Contrast,” he sums up the difference in sentences like these:

“Richmond determines, Washington reasons; Richmond is inflexible, Washington vacillates; Richmond knows what it wants to do, Washington wishes that it knew; Richmond loves slavery and hates liberty, Washington is somewhat partial to liberty and rather dislikes slavery; Rebellion is wise and sinful, Government is foolish.”

Upon a report that a member of the Cabinet had said “that nations often lose their institutions, their liberties, and yet preserve their national life, and that in our case we must aim to preserve the national life,” he writes an editorial (September 18, 1862) which he properly entitled “The Trumpet”:

“... Let other people imagine as they may a national life, like a disembodied spirit, wandering over the continent seeking rest and finding none. We propose no such issue to this struggle. The nation must emerge from war shorn of no attribute and mutilated in none of its members. We claim this continent for liberty. We demand the execution of slavery for treason. We arraign this arch-conspirator, arrested with a dagger in its hand aimed at the life of this government and the liberties of the people, and in the name of mankind and before Almighty God we demand that its life be forfeited. Let the trumpet sound!”

These are but samples of the editorials that were sent out from his pen through the columns of the Independent. Week after week they continued, pleading for vigor, denouncing inaction, urging that liberty be recognized as the great issue at stake, and demanding immediate emancipation of the slave.

336At last, after this long, weary, heart-breaking delay, he publishes, September 25, “The Proclamation” of the President announcing “that on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or any designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be thenceforward and for ever free.” Mr. Beecher says of it:

“We send forth to-day the most important paper ever published in the Independent, the most extraordinary document ever proceeding from this government....

“No more guises and veils. No more side-issues. No more deceitful compromises. The government has taken ground, and every man in the nation must take ground. You are for or against this government, and this government is declared to mean liberty to the slave! There is no neutral ground for traitors to hide in, playing wolf at night and sheep by day. The President’s proclamation will sift the North, give unity to its people, simplicity to its policy, liberty to its army! That whole army is no longer a mongrel something between a police force and a political caucus. It is an army organized to strike where blows will be most felt.

“The Proclamation emancipates slaves in thrice thirty days. But it emancipates the government and the army to-day. The nation is freer than it was on the 21st. We have a policy. The people will base it upon a principle. It is the policy of liberty upon the principle of justice. The future is before us! Through what dark days we must pass we know not. What battles and what reverses are in store we do not inquire. At last we have a right to believe that God is leading us. He who carried His people from bondage through the wilderness, and established them in the promised land, can surely guide us!

“Let sorrows fall fast; there is joy before us! We behold upon the troubled sea a Christ coming to us, walking on the waves! In His hand are winds and storms. Every hour now moves toward the great day of Emancipation. At length the dawn shall bring that day most eminent in our national calendar. Amid all the festivities that usher in the year, there shall be a great joy, deeper, purer, holier than ever came to us with the New Year—the joy of a nation that, after long sorrow and shame, shall 337cast off from itself the guilt of slavery, and stand erect before the world a consistent witness for liberty!”

He looks upon it as the beginning of the end, and is satisfied if it be God’s will that his work should now cease. On the evening of the last day of slavery in America—Wednesday evening, December 31—he says in his lecture-room talk:

“As for myself, let come what will come, I care not. God may peel me, and bark me, and strip me of my leaves, and do as He chooses with my earthly estate. I have lived long enough; I have had a good time. You cannot take back the blows I have given the devil right in the face. I have uttered some words that will not die, because they are incorporated into the lives of men that will not die. Through my instrumentality, aided by God’s providence, many souls have been converted and gone singing home to their eternal abode. I think I have a larger church in heaven than I have on earth, and I think they love me and want me there. I have no reason to ask for longer life. If my work is done, and God does not want me here, and this is my last night of labor on earth, ought I to be sorry? Ought I not to be the most grateful man that ever lived that I have had such health, that I have had such an open field, that I have had the privilege of speaking the truth right straight along for fifteen years, whether men would hear or whether they would forbear, and that I have been borne up, in doing this, by so large a church, composed of such an enthusiastic body of God’s people?

“And to-night the shadows of the past come over me. I remember when I first stood, in about this place, in the old church. I remember the sermon that I preached to you on the first Sunday night after I came among you, as if it were but an hour ago. I then declared to the inchoate congregation gathered here that it was my purpose to preach the Gospel in its applications to slavery, and peace, and war, and moral purity, and every Christian reform, and that I would do it whether you heard it or not, and whether you stood by me or forsook me. I recollect those times perfectly well.

“Fifteen years have passed since then, and here we are talking about the President of the United States emancipating four million slaves. Here we are in the midst of a war whose inevitable outcome from this time must be to make war on slavery. 338Mightier than Congress now is the arm for emancipation—mightier than all things! In the providence of God what wonderful revolutions and changes have taken place in fifteen years! I am willing to live fifteen years more, if God wishes it, if I may renew my youth and work on. I should dread to find now that there were no more locks to get up, and that I must henceforth travel on a dead level. I would try and pull with my freight-boat on a level, if God wished me to, though I would like here and there to rise. It would be a pleasure to live, if it were God’s will, till the day-star dawned, for I know it will dawn, but I am willing to lay down my burden at any time, if it please God. If He will accept the thanks that I give Him for all that He has permitted me to do, to say, and experience in days past, then, as to the future, let His will be done. I ask neither to live nor to die.”

This closes the third era of his work in the great anti-slavery contest. We now turn back to glance over the same period and note some of the more important events aside from this struggle, public, domestic, and private, that marked the years from 1850 to January, 1863.

First Voyage to England—Extracts from Diary—Warwick Castle—Stratford-on-Avon—The Skylark—Oxford—Bodleian Library—London—Old-time Sadness—Paris—Catch-Words from Diary—Effect of Picture-Gallery—The Louvre—His Return.

In the middle of the year 1850 his labors were interrupted.

“Henry Ward Beecher, our esteemed brother, sailed for Europe on Tuesday, July 9, in the ship New World, Captain Knight. It was a sudden move, but having received a friendly invitation from the captain, and taking the advice of his friends that a voyage out and back would be of essential benefit to his health, which has been considerably shattered by repeated attacks of illness, he accepted the invitation, but expects to return with the vessel. During his absence the pulpit of Plymouth Church will be supplied by the pastor’s younger brother, Rev. Charles Beecher, of Indiana.” This item we find in the Independent of that week:

“Journal.—Landed from New World July 30, 1850. Waterloo Inn.”

This is the first entry in a memorandum-book now in our hands, and it tells its own story. He is in Liverpool, England.

We have spoken of Mr. Beecher’s perfect health, and such he enjoyed, for the most part, through life. But it was only retained, after he came to Brooklyn, by great care on his part. Before he had learned the necessity of this there had been several failures. One was an attack of erysiphaltic fever, in the spring of 1849, which kept him out of his pulpit for several months. During the following winter he had a severe attack of quinsy, from the exhaustion of which it seemed to his friends that he was breaking down, and they procured passage for him to Europe, as has just been stated, and gave him a three months’ leave of absence.

Another experience now opened to him. The sea, out upon which he had so often looked with longing eyes, in boyhood, from the wharves of Boston, and across whose waters he had often sailed in imagination, he now, for the first time, traversed 340in reality. He found it far less agreeable than he expected, and learned on this his first voyage, what no after-experience ever contradicted, that for him “the only pleasant thing about going to sea was the going ashore.”

From his note-book and diary we can follow him, step by step, and from his letters to friends can learn of some of those experiences that made this trip memorable in its impressions and influence. The next entry in his journal reads:

“July 31, Manchester and back. Hedges same as combed and uncombed hair. Railroad mile-posts subdivided; grading in manufacturing villages. Go out from London under ground, come into Manchester over tops of houses. Clothes-line across streets.

“August 3, Birmingham; railroad stations. Knight says thirty-three ocean steamers have been put afloat in eighteen months; only the Bremen steamers before afloat.

”Plated Ware.—Pattern dies, stamping, handles, etc.; spoons, forks, plain piece, cut shape, then slit tines, stamp shape; filing-room, polishing, chasing or fretting, plating, brushing. Designer gets £2 to £2 10/per week.”

This is the first page of his note-book, and is given entire, not because there is anything remarkable about it, but because it is a sample of his note-books in general. They are full of facts, and facts of every description. He seldom gives impressions or sentiments. He has a hunger for all kinds of items; give him these and the sentiments will take care of themselves. Occasionally he concludes with a description that sets the items in some higher relation and shows the processes that are going on in his own mind; as when, after giving some dozen particulars in the process of manufacturing papier-maché, he closes the list of catch-words with this: “It is the art of creating plastic wood. It grows by hand and not by vegetable vitality, then hardens and receives Art.”

But it was not items alone that he learned in his travels; he became familiar with objects of which he had read, and gained inspiration from a more intimate acquaintance. In Warwick Castle and Kenilworth he walked among scenes made vivid to him in his youth in the pages of Sir Walter Scott. He entered, as he said, “into the very life of that olden time, and took from it its good without tasting its evil.”

341Cæsar’s Tower, which had stood for eight hundred years, co-eval with the Norman Conquest, especially aroused his imagination:

“I stood upon its mute stones and imagined the ring of the hammer upon them when the mason was laying them to their bed of ages. What were the thoughts, the fancies, the conversations of these rude fellows at that age of the world? I was wafted backward, and backward, until I stood on the foundations upon which old England herself was builded, when as yet there was none of her. There, far back of all literature, before the English tongue itself was formed, earlier than her jurisprudence and than all modern civilization, I stood in imagination, and, reversing my vision, looked down into a far future to search for the men and deeds which had been, as if they were yet to be; thus making a prophecy of history, and changing memory into a dreamy foresight.

“Against these stones, on which I lay my hand, have rung the sounds of battle. Yonder, on these very grounds, there raged, in sight of men that stand where I do, fiercest and deadliest conflicts. All this ground has fed on blood....

“I walked across to Guy’s Tower, up its long stone stairway, into some of its old soldiers’ rooms. The pavements were worn, though of stone, with the heavy, grinding feet of men-at-arms. I heard them laugh between their cups, I saw them devouring their gross food, I heard them recite their feats, or tell the last news of some knightly outrage or cruel oppression of the despised laborer. I stood by the window out of which the archer sent his whistling arrows. I stood by the openings through which scalding water or molten lead was poured upon the heads of the assailants, and heard the hoarse shriek of the wretched fellows who got the shocking baptism. I ascended to the roof of the tower, and looked over the wide glory of the scene, still haunted with the same imaginations of olden time. How many thoughts had flown hence besides mine!—here where warriors looked out or ladies watched for their knights’ return. How did I long to stand for one hour, really, in their position and in their consciousness who lived in those days; and then to come back, with the new experience, to my modern self!”

In this is shown his sympathy with the old Saxon yeomanry, and was his Saxon ancestry taking voice; all the romantic, picturesque 342elements of his nature were fed, and ran, like the streams of springtide, full-banked to the sea.

We next find in his note-book these items and references:

“Approach to Stratford-on-Avon. How peaceful the associations in contrast with those of Warwick and Kenilworth!”

“The place: old English houses; Red Horse Inn.”

“Birds: thrush, lark, nightingale, sparrow, robin, starling, rooks, cuckoo.”

“A different but, to me, even greater interest attaches to Avon from the throngs from every nation that have visited it.”

“Shakspere: eleven years old when Elizabeth visited Kenilworth.”

“No greater change can be imagined than from the warlike towers of Guy of Warwick to the quiet home of Shakspere, Stratford-on-Avon.” The change in his experience was equally marked. In the one the martial spirit of the warrior, in the other the loving, receptive spirit of the prophet and poet, were aroused and fed. In Stratford-on-Avon he had one of those luminous hours which were, in his experience, like Mountains of Transfiguration.

In a letter to a friend describing a Sabbath here, written at this time, he says:

“The scenes of Saturday had fired me; every visit to various points in Stratford-on-Avon added to the inspiration, until, as I sallied forth to church, I seemed not to have a body. I could hardly feel my feet striking against the ground; it was as if I were numb. But my soul was clear, penetrating, and exquisitely susceptible....

“I had been anxious lest some Cowper’s ministerial fop should officiate, and the sight of this aged man was good. The form of his face and head indicated firmness, but his features were suffused with an expression of benevolence.

“He ascended the reading-desk and the services began. You know my mother was, until her marriage, in the communion of the Episcopal Church. This thought hardly left me while I sat, grateful for the privilege of worshipping God through a service that had expressed so often her devotions. I cannot tell you how much I was affected. I had never had such a trance of worship, and I shall never have such another view until I gain the Gate.

“I am so ignorant of the church service that I cannot call 343the various parts by their right names, but the portions which most affected me were the prayers and responses which the choir sang. I had never heard any part of a supplication, a direct prayer, chanted by a choir, and it seemed as though I heard not with my ear but with my soul. I was dissolved; my whole being seemed to me like an incense wafted gratefully toward God. The divine presence rose before me in wondrous majesty, but of ineffable gentleness and goodness, and I could not stay away from more familiar approach, but seemed irresistibly yet gently drawn toward God. My soul, then thou didst magnify the Lord and rejoice in the God of thy salvation! And then came to my mind the many exultations of the Psalms of David, and never before were the expressions and figures so noble and so necessary to express what I felt. I had risen, it seemed to me, so high as to be where David was when his soul conceived the things which he wrote. Throughout the service—and it was an hour and a quarter long—whenever an ‘Amen!’ occurred it was given by the choir accompanied by the organ and the congregation. Oh! that swell and solemn cadence rings in my ear yet!

“Not once, not a single time, did it occur in that service without bringing tears from my eyes. I stood like a shrub on a spring morning—every leaf covered with dew, and every breeze shook down some drops. I trembled so much at times that I was obliged to sit down. Oh! when in the prayers, breathed forth in strains of sweet, simple, solemn music, the love of Christ was recognized, how I longed then to give utterance to what that love seemed to me. There was a moment in which the heavens seemed opened to me and I saw the glory of God! All the earth seemed to me a store-house of images made to set forth the Redeemer, and I could scarcely be still from crying out. I never knew, I never dreamed before of what heart there was in that word amen. Every time it swelled forth and died away solemnly, not my lips, not my mind, but my whole being said: ‘Saviour, so let it be.’

“The sermon was preparatory to the communion, which I then first learned was to be celebrated. It was plain and good; and although the rector had done many things in a way that led me to suppose that he sympathized with over-much ceremony, yet in his sermon he seemed evangelical and gave a right view of the Lord’s Supper.

344“For the first time in my life I went forward to commune in an Episcopal church. Without any intent of my own, but because from my seat it was nearest, I knelt down at the altar, with the dust of Shakspere beneath my feet. I thought of it as I thought of ten thousand other things, without the least disturbance of devotion. It seemed as if I stood upon a place so high that, like one looking over a wide valley, all objects conspired to make but one view. I thought of the General Assembly and Church of the First-Born, of my mother and brother and children in heaven, of my living family on earth, of you, of the whole church entrusted to my hands—they afar off, I upon the banks of the Avon.”

He did not forget his old friends, birds and trees. From Stratford-on-Avon he writes:

“As I stood looking over on the masses of foliage and the single trees dotted in here and there, I could see every shade of green, and all of them most beautiful, and as refreshing to me as old friends. After standing awhile to take a last view of Stratford-on-Avon from this high ground and the beautiful slopes around it, and of the meadows of the Avon, I began to walk homeward, when I heard such an outbreak behind me as wheeled me about quick enough. There he flew, singing as he rose, and rising gradually, not directly up, but with gentle slope—there was the free-singing lark, not half so happy to sing as I was to hear. In a moment more he had reached the summit of his ambition and suddenly fell back to the grass again. And now if you laugh at my enthusiasm I will pity you for the want of it. I have heard one poet’s lark, if I never hear another, and am much happier for it.”

At Oxford a new world opened to him—that of an English university town enriched with the growth and associations of seven hundred years. The beauty of its architecture, its cloistered quiet, its galleries, and, most of all, its libraries, impressed him.

“Few places affect me more than libraries, and especially the Bodleian Library, reputed to have half a million printed books and manuscripts. I walked solemnly and reverently among the alcoves and through the halls, as if in the pyramid of embalmed souls. It was their life, their heart, their mind, that they treasured in these book-urns. Silent as they are, should all the 345emotions that went to their creation have utterance, could the world itself contain the various sounds? They longed for fame! Here it is—to stand silently for ages, moved only to be dusted and catalogued, valued only as units in the ambitious total, and gazed at occasionally by men ignorant as I am of their name, their place, their language, and their worth. Indeed, unless a man can link his written thoughts with the everlasting wants of men, so that they shall draw from them as from wells, there is no more immortality to the thoughts and feelings of the soul than to the muscles and the bones. A library is but the soul’s burial-ground. It is the land of shadows.”

It was, however, not all shadowy.

“Noon Refection.—‘What will you take to drink, Oxford ale or a little wine?’ Cold water. ‘Oh! not cold water, surely? A little sherry and water?’ ‘Surely you will not come to England to drink cold water?’ My dear sir, I am a thorough-going teetotaler, and you surely would not have me come to England to lose my good principles? ‘Why, sir, I am not a teetotaler, but I am a temperance man—was never drunk in my life—but you surprise me!’

“Dining and tea-room of Fellows. Elaborate carved oak—no sham. In all respects college in quadrangle proposes to take care of its students, head and stomach, soul, intellect, and body, and therefore has added kitchen to library.”

“London, August 9.—Arrived last night. Old Bell. Visited Trafalgar Square and Westminster Abbey, Guildhall, Bank of England, Tower, Tunnel, etc.”

In London something of the old-time sadness came over him, with the old-time sources of relief:

“Now, too, I am apt, if I do not fall asleep soon enough—or more frequently when I awake, hours before it is the fashion here to get up—to lie and think over my way of life hitherto; and my life-work seems to me to be so little, and so poorly done, that I feel discouraged at the thought of resuming it! I have everywhere in my travelling—at the shrine of the martyrs in Oxford, at the graves of Bunyan and Wesley in London, at the vault in which Raleigh was for twelve years confined in the Tower—asked myself whether I could have done and endured what they did, and as they did! It is enough to make one tremble for himself to have such a heart-sounding as this gives him. I cast the lead 346for the depth of my soul, and it strikes so soon that I have little reason for pride.

“Had it not been for paintings, and flowers, and trees, and the landscapes, I do not know what I should have done with myself. Often when extremely distressed I have gone to the parks or out of the city to some quiet ground where I could find a wooded stream, and the woods filled with birds, and found, almost in a moment, a new spirit coming over me. I was rid of men, almost of myself. I seemed to find a sacred sweetness and calmness, not coming over me, but into me. I seemed nearer to heaven. I felt less sadness about life, for God would take care of it; and my own worthlessness, too, became a source of composure, for on that very account it made little difference in the world’s history whether I lived or died. God worked, it seemed to me, upon a scale so vast and rich in details that anything and anybody could be spared and not affect the results of life.”

He crossed over to Paris in August, and his note-book gives us catch-words and sentences evidently intended for reminders of sights, incidents, and adventures that he wished to remember. So disconnected are they that they are of little worth except as showing what interested him in this great city on this his first visit, and as affording the raw materials out of which grew his letters and more finished descriptions.

When he arrived, by what route, at what hotel he stopped, he apparently did not think worth noting; but what he saw in the life of the people he wished to remember, and the first few pages of his diary are filled with items like these: “Three mothers with their babies.” “Boy and sister frolicking, six or seven years old.” “Family on seat; little thing talking, about three years old.” “Twelve soldiers going to relieve sentinels.” “Stand for flowers,” etc.

Next to the life of the common people the largest space in his diary is given to the art-galleries. On two pages he jots down “Effect of Gallery on my Mind”:

“1st. Astonishment, at number and exquisite character, beyond what had expected—not of something finer, but such as to make me feel that before I had not seen anything.

“2d. Then sense of intense pleasure, from what do not stop to inquire. It is not color, form, composition, nor mere sympathy with thing expressed. It is the whole. The walls flame 347out as if the hall was a summer and all shining in concentration upon you. I see all that is painted—and more. I see, beyond, other visions, the mute figures speak. I imagine the scene before the time chosen and afterwards.

“3d. Then comes sense of beauty, complex, of rich and exquisite coloring; also the beauty of the scenes. The objects, in other words, and the instrument of their manifestation.

“4th. Then you begin to select and to hang in a dreamy review over one or another. Time is not known; you wake by some footfall. Whether you have been here an hour or four you cannot tell; it seems by the populous experience a long time. You do not weary, but you exhale—i.e., the senses seem to flag, while mind is keener than ever, and you imagine rather than see; as one who is exhilarated by wine sees, to be sure, but his own mind affords the color and—”

In his letters he afterwards enlarged upon this topic: “Ah! what a new world has been opened to me, and what a new sense within myself! I knew that I had gradually grown fond of pictures from my boyhood. I had felt the power of some few. But nothing had ever come up to a certain ideal that had hovered in my mind, and I supposed I was not fine enough to appreciate with discrimination the works of masters. To find myself absolutely intoxicated; to find my system so much affected that I could not control my nerves; to find myself trembling, and laughing, and weeping, and almost hysterical, and that in spite of my shame and determination to behave better—such a power of these galleries over me I had not expected. I have lived for two days in fairyland, wakened out of it by some few sights which I have mechanically visited, more for the sake of pleasing friends at home, when I return, than for a present pleasure to myself, but relapsing again into the golden vision....

“I could not tell whether hours or minutes were passing. It was a blessed exhalation of soul, in which I seemed freed from matter, and, as a diffused intelligence, to float in the atmosphere. I could not believe that a dull body was the centre from which thought and emotion radiated. I had a sense of expansion, of etherealization, which gave me some faint sense of a spiritual state. Nor was I in a place altogether unfitted for such a state. The subject of many of the works—suffering, heroic resistance, angels, Arcadian scenes, especially the scenes of 348Christ’s life and death—seemed not unfitting accompaniment to my mind, and suggested to me, in a glorious vision, the drawing near of a redeemed soul to the precincts of heaven! Oh! with what an outburst of soul did I implore Christ to wash me, and all whom I loved, in His precious blood, that we might not fail of entering the glorious city whose builder and maker is God! All my sins seemed not only sins but great deformities. They seemed not merely affronts against God but insults to my own nature! My soul snuffed at them and trod them down as the mire in the street. Then, holy and loving thoughts toward God or toward man seemed to me to be as beautiful as those fleecy islets along the west at sunset, crowned with glory; and the gentler aspirations for goodness and nobleness and knowledge seemed to me like silver mists through which the morning is striking, wafting them gently and in wreaths and films heavenward. Great deeds, heroism for worthy objects, for God, or for one’s fellows, or for one’s own purity, seemed not only natural but as things without which a soul could not live.

“But at length I perceived myself exhausted, not by any sense of fatigue (I had no sense or body), but by perceiving that my mind would not fix upon material objects, but strove to act by itself. Thus a new picture was examined only for an instant, and then I exhaled into all kinds of golden dreams and visions.

“I left the gallery, and in this mood, as I threaded my way back, how beautiful did everything and everybody seem! The narrow streets were beautiful for being narrow, and the broad ones for being broad; old buildings had their glory, and new structures had theirs; children were all glorified children; I loved the poor workmen that I saw in the confined and narrow shops; the various women, young and old, with huge buck-baskets, or skipping hither and thither on errands, all seemed happy, and my soul blessed them as I passed.

“My own joy of being overflowed upon everything which I met. Sometimes singing to myself, or smiling to others so as to make men think, doubtless, that I had met some good luck or was on some prosperous errand of love, I walked on through street after street, turning whichever corner, to the right or left, happened to please the moment, neither knowing or caring where I went, but always finding something to see and enjoying all things. Nor do I know yet by what instinct I rounded up my 349journeyings by finding my proper lodging. That night I slept, as to my body, but felt little difference between dreaming asleep and dreaming awake.”

We turn from his note-book and letters to one of the papers of the day, and read: “Rev. H. W. Beecher, our esteemed brother, has returned from his transatlantic trip with improved health. He reached New York yesterday (evening) in the Asia, September 11.”

He arrived unexpectedly and found his family, which had been spending the summer at Sutton, Mass., with the grandmother, awaiting him. His trip had been a success in every particular. Not only was his health restored, but his field of observation had been vastly broadened and his experiences greatly deepened. England, the home of his race, had been seen and touched; he had visited her castles, colleges, and churches; walked among her fields, become acquainted with her people; and henceforth her noble history, great achievements, and mighty names seemed more real to him, and she was more admired and beloved than ever.

In Paris he became conscious for the first time of the power of true art, and began that study of it which only ended with his life.

But, whether in England or France, so well read was he in the history of the places visited, and so vivid was his imagination to bring back the scenes and men that made these places memorable, that his journey was as a sojourn with the wisest and best of our race, and he returned from it refreshed and enlarged for the work that, for a few weeks, had been laid aside.

Church and Steamboat—Jenny Lind—Hospitality—Colonel Pertzel—The Family—Twins—Medicine—Giving Counsel—For the Sailor—An Absurd Story Contradicted—Salisbury—Trouting—Death of Alfred and Arthur—Letters to his Daughter at School—Lenox—Equivocal Honors Declined—The Pulpit—“Plymouth Collection”—“Shining Shore.” A Church Liturgy—Courting with his Father’s old Love-letters—1857 a Year of Trial—Matteawan—Visit to Litchfield—1858 a Year of Harvest—Revival Meetings—Hospitality of Plymouth Church—Courtesy to Errorists—New Organ—Peekskill—Letters to his Daughter abroad—Marriage of his Daughter—Lecturing—Title of D.D. declined—Flowers in Church—Christian Liberty in the Use of the Beautiful—His two Lines of Labor.

No sooner has he put his foot on shore than he is engaged in battle. This time it is against religious bigotry and intolerance upon the seas. A Star article from his pen appeared September 19 upon “Church and Steamboat—Cunard Line”:

No religious service was allowed on the steamers except that which was appointed for the crew, at which the passengers were permitted to be present. No one was allowed to read the service there except the captain, who, having been playing cards late Saturday night, and being addicted to the sailor habit of profanity, was not considered fit for the office. No one at all was permitted to preach, or, if the rule were ever varied, only a clergyman of Episcopal ordination. One of the owners, who happened to be on the ship, when courteously asked to allow some one of the nine clergymen on board to preach, and to give the use of one of the several cabins to those who chose to have service of their own, lost his temper and said that if Americans did not choose to go on his line, “d——— ’em! they may go to h———.” All this appeared to Mr. Beecher as rank injustice and an interference with the freedom of worship of multitudes of travellers. Humorously, yet with good, solid, set phrase, he denounces this bigotry in the article above mentioned. Like most of his articles, it was strong enough to draw the fire of the enemy.

351The captain and the son of this owner reply in letters which partly explain, partly deny, but wholly charge Mr. Beecher with falsehood. This brings another article from him in the next issue, September 26:

“It is not to be supposed, gentlemen, that either of you can sympathize fully with me in an inveterate prejudice which I have contracted against lying in all its moods and tenses. But, really, I feel hurt that you have so low an opinion of my ingenuity as to suppose that, if I set out to tell lies, I should tell such poor and graceless ones.

“Allow me to assure you, gentlemen, that while my principles forbid me to employ falsehood, yet should I attempt it I should conscientiously endeavor to lie well.”

He reiterates his charges, adds to them some further remarks upon the gambling habits of the captain, which unfit him to act as conductor of public worship, procures affidavits from responsible parties to substantiate his charges, and refers them to the courts for redress, if they think themselves aggrieved.

The first battle upon his return to his native land was waged for freedom of worship upon the high seas!

In this same month of September, Jenny Lind came to this country and began that series of concerts which have never been surpassed. Her first concert in Castle Garden, September 11, netted $30,000. Some of the papers having criticised her and her manager for the high price of tickets, and the community for paying it, Mr. Beecher takes up the cudgels in her behalf:

“Jenny Lind, if we understand her desires and aims, is employing a resplendent musical genius in the most noble accordance with the spirit of the Gospel. In her we behold a spectacle of eminent genius employing its magic power in the elevation of the human race.

“If men would spare from the disgusting weed and poisonous liquors one-half of what they spend every month, there are few so poor as not to be able to hear Jenny Lind.        *”

One of his children gives this incident:

“In those early days father always had a flower-garden in the back-yard of our city homes. I remember when we lived in the little, brown wooden house on Columbia Heights, Jenny Lind came to board near us for a short time. All the neighboring 352children used to gather round her door to see her start for her drive; and one day when we saw the carriage in front of her house, I ran in to ask father if H——— and I could go and see her come out. He was at work in the garden among his flowers, and, after giving his consent, called me back, cut a handful of roses, and told me I could take those and give them to her. So off H——— and I went, but I believe, after all, my courage failed, and I brought them home again, very much ashamed. Father laughed, but comforted me by saying he’d rather I would be too shy than too bold.”

He closes this eventful year (1850) with two Star articles—the one (December 12), “Remember the Poor”: “Upon the whole, we doubt if there is any other means of grace so profitable to a Christian as the whole duty of relieving the poor; for giving money is but a small part, and often the least effective part, of duty to them. Every man ought to take a single case or family, and look after them through the winter.” Another (December 19) upon “Different Ways of Giving”: “Now and then you will find a man whose face is March but whose pocket is June. He will storm and scold at you, but send you away with ten times as much as you asked.”

Mr. Beecher was very hospitable, and kept open house for friends, and even for such chance acquaintance as came to be associated with him. “When Kossuth was in this country, Colonel Pertzel, his chief of staff, with his wife, stopped with us for several weeks. When they went away she gave me her bracelet of national coins, which, she said, was prized by the Hungarian women in their exile above all their possessions.

“Our own family circle at this time consisted of father, mother, and three children—two boys and a girl. Besides these Aunt Esther was with us, whom I remember as little and round, straight and precise, with snapping black eyes, looking after the second generation of nephews and nieces, and telling us stories; and also Grandma Bullard, doing the mending and cosseting while she sang ‘Bounding Billow’ and ‘Like the Hart and the Roe.’ Dear, ideal old grandmother!”

December 20, 1852, there was an addition to this circle. “I can remember sitting in the parlor one evening with Aunt Esther, and father’s coming in, going up to her, and kissing her first on one cheek and then on the other, and her giving a little jump, 353saying, ‘Not two, Henry!’ and his answering, ‘Yes, two.’ Then he told me that I had two little new brothers up-stairs.

“Father was so proud of these twins that I remember on New Year’s day he took fifteen or twenty of the Hungarians who were making New Year’s calls up into mother’s room to see them.”

At the Thanksgiving service of this year Mr. Beecher had announced that an effort would be made to raise by subscription the sum of $13,000 to pay off the floating debt of the church before January 1, and the papers of a later date contain the announcement that the sum was promptly subscribed, “and Plymouth Church may now be considered on a firm foundation in temporal matters, and is in every way in a prosperous condition.”

The church entered the new year, 1852, without debt, and more than ten thousand dollars were realized from the rent of the pews.

Evidently he begins the year with especial effort to overcome spiritual coldness among the people, and bring in the summer of Christian life and growth, for his Star Papers are upon subjects like these: “Ice in the Church,” “Various Convictions of Sin,” and later are announcements in the papers of morning prayer-meetings in “Plymouth Church,” “Preaching Every Evening.”

In due time the announcement is made that “sixty persons were last Sabbath morning received into the church, fifty upon profession of faith.”

He is experiencing one of the evils to which religious meetings are prone, and concerning it he sends out a note of warning, “One Cause of Dull Meetings”:

“We hardly know of a more unprofitable exercise for social meetings than what is called exhortation. Men impose upon themselves and social meetings degenerate into absurd formalities—a pretence of caring for what they do not care for, of renouncing what all the world knows they do not renounce, of asking for what they do not desire and desiring what they dare not ask.”

Through life Mr. Beecher was as free with pathies in medicine as of isms in religion, and used allopathy, homœopathy, hydropathy, electricity, or hand-rubbing, as seemed to him at the time most likely to secure the coveted result. In general he trusted more to the man than to the system. His position on this matter, which he held substantially for years, is given in a review of a medical work:

354“In good earnest, we regard medicine with little favor. Our first recipe for sickness is, not to get sick. Our second is reliance upon a well-bred, sensible doctor. We select the doctor. It is his business to select the medicine, and we do not care a pin what it is. To all who ask us, therefore, what school we belong to, we reply: ‘We are firmly persuaded of Dr. ———.’ This is the sum of our present creed.”

His interest in common men and their affairs brought many to him by letter or in personal conversation for advice in their difficulties. Probably few physicians or lawyers in good practice were consulted by more people than came daily to Mr. Beecher. So practical were his principles of action, so great his sympathy with men in trouble, and such his ability to see through the difficulty, that men came to him for counsel from far and near.

A man asks him as to his duty to his creditors under certain peculiar circumstances which he mentions. Mr. Beecher goes over the matter in detail, states the ground of difficulty in that and all similar cases, and points out the way of relief in this fruitful sentence: “Selfishness is the great mischief-maker in settlements. Men think of their own rights first and their creditors’ afterwards. Reverse this. Be careful first that no man suffer by you.”

Again, at this time a man writes asking as to the duty of a temperance man and a professor of religion in regard to selling liquor as an agent.

“... He, therefore, who loves his situation or his pocket more than his religion can expect but little sympathy from robust Christians, and little favor from that Christ of the cross who has ordered a church of cross-bearing disciples. But we will turn our friend in such a dilemma over to our friend Hall, a drayman in New York, who utterly refuses to cart liquor, who will not unload a ship if in so doing he must cart brandy. For he says he will not disgrace any horse that he owns by letting him be seen with a load of liquor behind him.”

While carrying a free lance ready as any knight of old to champion every cause that was suffering injustice, we want to emphasize the fact that he had none of that small, truculent spirit that leads to personal attacks. He was very lenient to individual human failures, charitable in his judgments, and would rather attempt to save by hiding than to punish by exposing them. In 355answer to a question which we once asked concerning a man who, to our mind, had greatly transgressed the limits of public propriety, if not of morality, “Why don’t you pitch in and show up this matter?” this man of a thousand battles said quietly, with just a shade of rebuke for the spirit we had shown in his tone: “I don’t like to pitch into folks as much as some do.” But when wrong or injustice had wrought itself into a system, it made no difference to him how high in position they were who upheld it, or how low in the scale were the sufferers, or how securely entrenched was the wrong; he waited for no invitation, he asked no permission, he sought for no support, but attacked it at once, aiming to expose and remove the root element of the evil.

An illustration of this characteristic of Mr. Beecher is afforded by an article written by him at this time upon “Naval Discipline,” in which he brings to the sailor the same broad sympathy, established principles, and clear reasoning that he was accustomed to employ in the case of another and very different class:

“... It is of little use to cobble a system whose radical idea is wrong. This is our judgment in the case of the American navy. The republican institutions of America, slavery always excepted, contemplate the improvement and elevation of the masses. Government does not undertake to educate the citizen, but it contemplates, it is obliged from its origin to accommodate itself to the radical idea of, the liberty of the people to move among themselves, to guide, to change, to advance freely in any direction. The American navy is a monarchy. Its subjects are regarded in but one light—they are to be under service. More than this nothing is thought of. Sailors have no liberty. There is neither provision for, nor expectation of, improvement.... There must be an entirely new spirit infused into the whole system of such service.

”... In short, the naval system must address the social and moral need of the sailor. They must be allowed to act under all those high motives which develop men on shore.”

While moved by these world-wide sympathies, he was in no mood to submit with patience to bigotry nearer home, and utters a very strong protest against the ostracizing of certain Sabbath-schools by the orthodox schools of Brooklyn in their yearly parade:

356“We ought to seize such an occasion to promote kindly feelings and cultivate such sympathy as differing sects might lawfully have in common. There is no liberality in urging this matter; it is simply common sense and common decency....

“Does the ——— (paper) regard it as dangerous to walk the streets with a Unitarian? Is heresy like smallpox, so contagious that one school will give it to another by sitting for an hour in the same audience-room with it?... We shall pray more earnestly than ever for the advance of that day when the love of God shall abound in the hearts of men and inspire men to love each other.”

His Star Papers of 1852 close with this, which will at once be recognized as eminently characteristic:

“We had always supposed that absurd stories grew in this vicinity like weeds in the tropics or trees planted by rivers. For once, however, the country newspapers have got ahead of our neighborhood.

“We have made diligent search, taken the census, examined every cradle, drawer, closet, crib, nook, and corner, and are prepared to affirm the following story, which was born in the Windham County Telegraph, the Norwich Tribune, Springfield Republican, Boston Chronicle, and other papers, to be exaggerated:

“‘Rev. H. W. Beecher’s lady has presented him with five little responsibilities in a little better than one year: two soon after the arrival of Kossuth and three the other day.’

“Twins there were a year ago whose blessed faces fill the house with light, but the three above-mentioned were born of those maternal editors whose brains fulfil the prophet’s word, ‘Ye shall consume chaff; ye shall bring forth stubble.’

“We turn these mousing, mongering editors over to the next woman’s-rights convention; or, if they are not fit for a seat there, they may amuse the children with nursery tales while the mothers are at discussion; or, if not fit for that, let them in mercy be bound out as very dry nurses at some foundling hospital.”

He spends the summer of 1853, as he had the one preceding, at Salisbury, Connecticut.

“Once more we find ourselves at home among lucid green trees, among hills and mountains, with lakes and brooks on every side, and country roads threading their way in curious circuits 357among them. All day long we have moved about with dreamy newness of life. Birds, crickets, and grasshoppers are the only players upon instruments that molest the air. Chanticleer is at this instant proclaiming over the whole valley that the above declaration is a slander on his musical gifts. Very well; add chanticleer to cricket, grasshopper, and bird. Add, also, a cow, for I hear her distant low melodious through the valley, with all roughness strained out by the trees through which it comes hitherward. O this silence in the air, this silence on the mountains, this silence on the lakes!”

He closes a long letter upon trouting in this fashion:

“You forget your errand. You select a dry, tufty knoll, and, lying down, you gaze up into the sky. O those depths! Something in you reaches out and yearns. You have a vague sense of infinity, of vastness, of the littleness of human life, and the sweetness and grandeur of divine life and of eternity. You people that vast ether. You stretch away through it and find that celestial city beyond, and therein dwell oh! how many that are yours! Tears come unbidden. You begin to long for release. You pray. Was there ever a better closet? Under the shadow of the mountain, the heavens full of cloudy cohorts, like armies of horsemen and chariots, your soul is loosened from the narrow judgments of human life, and touched with a full sense of immortality and the liberty of a spiritual state. An hour goes past. How full has it been of feelings struggling to be thoughts, and thoughts deliquescing into feeling! Twilight is coming. You have miles to ride home. Not a trout in your basket! Never mind; you have fished in the heavens and taken great store of prey. Let them laugh at your empty basket. Take their raillery good-naturedly; you have certainly had good luck.”

The sadness which is plainly visible in the passage quoted is an old acquaintance. We have learned to expect its appearance somewhere at every feast. At this time undoubtedly it comes the oftener because of the sorrowful experiences of the early summer. The twins, Alfred and Arthur, “whose blessed faces fill the house with light,” had both died on the fourth of July of this year, and been buried in the same grave.

It was one of the deep sorrows of his life, seldom mentioned save when attempting by his sympathy to comfort others in like affliction; it became a fountain of deep and tender feeling for all 358in distress, and of earnest longings for the rest and the reunions of heaven.

The going away of his daughter to boarding-school during the autumn makes another break in the family, to which he refers in a letter in November:

In a letter to her the following June he mentions an important domestic event:

This year he spent the summer in Lenox, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where a few friends have aided him to purchase a farm, “which the deeds, with great definiteness, say contains ninety-six acres, more or less.” Annoyed by the inquisitiveness of certain newspapers, he goes on to say:

“We gave for farm and farm-buildings $4,500; for the crops, stock, implements, etc., $1,000 more; total, $5,500. Any person in search of useful information can have further particulars as to terms of payment and any other private publicities by personal application to us.”

His emotions upon taking possession are described in a letter of that date:

“It was in the presence of this pasture elm, which we name the Queen, that we first felt to our very marrow that we had indeed become owners of the soil! It was with a feeling of awe that we looked up into its face, and when I whispered to myself, ‘This is mine,’ there was a shrinking, as if there were sacrilege in the very thought of property in such a creature of God as this cathedral-topped tree! Does a man bare his head in some old church? So did I, standing in the shadow of this regal tree, and looking up into that completed glory at which three hundred years have been at work with noiseless fingers! What was I in its presence but a grasshopper? My heart said, ‘I may not call thee property, and that property of mine! Thou belongest to the air. Thou art the child of summer. Thou art the mighty temple where birds praise God. Thou belongest to no man’s hand, but to all men’s eyes that do love beauty, and that have learned through beauty to behold God! Stand, then, in thine own beauty and grandeur! I shall be a lover and a protector, to keep drought from thy roots and the axe from thy trunk.’”

360Although the owner of the farm, we are not to suppose that he took hold of work as the neighboring farmers did. We fancy that his love of downright hard work exhausted itself in the West.

“The chief use of a farm, if it be well selected and of a proper soil, is to lie down upon. Mine is an excellent farm for such uses, and I thus cultivate it every day. Large crops are the consequence, of great delight and fancies more than the brain can hold. My industry is exemplary. Though but a week here, I have lain down more hours and in more places than that hard-working brother of mine in the whole year that he has dwelt here. Strange that industrious lying down should come so naturally to me, and standing up and lazing about after the plough or behind the scythe so naturally to him!”

When we remember how many ministers who take an interest in public affairs find themselves elected to some town or village office, made mayor of a city, sent to the State Legislature or even to Congress, we are surprised that Mr. Beecher was never elected, so far as we remember, to the smallest public office. This was largely owing to the fact that he looked upon the work of a preacher, to inspire men to right conduct in public affairs, as more important than filling any official position, however high.

He declares this opinion facetiously, but none the less as a matter of deliberate judgment, in a letter:

EQUIVOCAL HONORS DECLINED.

“The Tribune last Saturday, in reply to a private letter asking its advice on the matter, recommends that we be nominated for Congress, elected and sent, and, when that shall be done, that we go....

“Had the proposal to go to Congress proceeded from the American Board of Missions there would have been grave reasons for considering it. We doubt whether they have a harder field in all heathendom, nor yet a field where the Gospel is more needed. But, for mere political reasons, to backslide from the pulpit into Congress is a little too long a slide for the first venture. We beg to decline in advance.”

In some of the sharp discussions of this year, 1854, the ministry 361have been bitterly criticised by papers who opposed politics in public, and a great deal of advice has been given to ministers concerning preaching. This receives his attention in this fashion:

“When one considers the amount of advice given to ministers about preaching, it is surprising that there should ever be again a dull or improper sermon.

”... We have no doubt that a rigorous landlord, having sharked it all the week, screwing and gripping among his tenants, would be better pleased on Sunday to doze through an able Gospel sermon on divine mysteries than be kept awake by a practical sermon that, among other things, set forth the duties of a Christian landlord. A broker who has gambled on a magnificent scale all the week does not go to church to have his practical swindlings analyzed and measured by the ‘New Testament spirit.’ Catechism is what he wants; doctrine is to his taste. A merchant whose last bale of smuggled goods was safely stored on Saturday night, and his brother-merchant who on the same day swore a false invoice through the custom-house—they go to church to hear a sermon on faith, on angels, on resurrection. As they have nothing invested in those subjects, they expect the minister to be bold and orthodox. But if he wants respectable merchants to pay ample pew-rents, let him not vulgarize the pulpit by introducing commercial questions. A rich Christian brother owns largely in a distillery, and is clamorous against letting down to the vulgarity of temperance sermons. Another man buys tax-titles and noses around all the week to see who can be slipped out of a vacant lot. On Sunday he naturally wants us to preach about eternity, or moral ability and inability. A mechanic that plies his craft with the unscrupulous appliance of every means that will win, he, too, wants “doctrine” on the Sabbath—not these secular questions. Men wish two departments in life—the secular and the religious. Between them a high and opaque wall is to be built. They wish to do just what they please for six long days. Then, stepping the other side of the wall, they wish the minister to assuage their fears, to comfort their conscience, and furnish them a clear ticket and insurance for heaven. By such a shrewd management our modern financiers are determined to show that a Christian can serve two masters, both God and Mammon, at the same time.”

362While fully alive to all the advantages of natural forces, the Sabbath, the pulpit, and a spiritual church-membership always held the highest place in his regard.

“It is no small thing, as it regards the education of the community, that from their youth up they have been taught to discuss all questions from ascertained and authoritative moral grounds....

“The pulpit is the popular religious educator. Its object is to stimulate and develop the religious feelings....

“When a whole community are wont to have their social life, their secular business, their public duties taken out of their low and selfish attitudes, and lifted up into the light of God’s countenance, and there measured, judged, repressed, or developed, and wholly bathed or inspired by the spirit of conscience and of love, then they are receiving a moral education for which there is no other provision except the Sabbath and the pulpit.

“Such are the members that make a church rich—poor in this world’s goods, but rich toward God—rich in faith, in hope, in meekness, in patience, in prayer, and, according to the feeble measure of their ability, in good works. Many a church is destroyed through an ambition of having strong and wealthy men, only rich, not holy....

“It may be very easy to sustain a church that has great wealth and little piety, but it is not worth sustaining. It is not a moral power.”

He had no confidence in secret political organizations. “One might as well study optics in the pyramids of Egypt or the subterranean tombs of Rome, as liberty in secret conclaves controlled by hoary knaves versed in political intrigue, who can hardly enough express their surprise and delight to find honest men going into a wide-spread system of secret caucuses. Honest men in such places have the peculiar advantage that flies have in a spider’s web—the privilege of losing their legs, of buzzing without flying, and of being eaten up at leisure by big-bellied spiders!...

“When will men understand that simple, open integrity, an unflinching adhesion to PRINCIPLE, is the peculiar advantage of truth and liberty? All that the Right asks is air, light, an open enemy, and room to strike. It is Wrong that sneaks in the dark and gains by the stiletto.       *”

363From time to time he gave examination to modern spiritualism, with this result:

“I am a stout unbeliever in the spiritual origin of this phenomenon, either by good spirits, bad spirits, or any spirits whatever.

“A belief in modern spiritualism seems to weaken the hold of the Bible upon conscience, the affections, and to substitute diluted sentimentalism and tedious platitudes instead of inspired truth.”

In 1855 Mr. Beecher published the “Plymouth Collection.” Of its history he has spoken somewhat at length:

“Soon after I came to Brooklyn from the West the conductor of music in this church was a Mr. Jones. He was intimately associated with the house of Mason Bros., publishers of music in New York, and sons of Lowell Mason, of honored and revered memory. I desired very much to inaugurate a new day in music—that is to say, to transfer to the great congregation on Sunday the same methods, so far as singing was concerned, that we had already instituted in our evening meetings, our conference meetings, and our revival meetings—namely, that of having both the hymns and the music before them at the same time.

“I can go back in my memory, easily, to the time when there was no hymn-book with notes for church use. The ‘Christian Lyre,’ edited by Joshua Leavitt, was largely used in the revivals under Dr. Finney, and ‘Christian Songs,’ by Mr. Hastings (the sweet singer of Israel, whose service to the church was never adequately recognized), were also used in revivals. When these books came they brought a progeny with them; but still there was nothing of the kind for the great congregation. The music-books for choirs were those long, narrow, inconvenient ones which could not well be held in the hand, but must always needs be laid upon a shelf. These were granted to the choir only, and the congregation had to sing from memory or not at all. It seemed to me that it would be a step in the right direction to put the tunes and hymns together, so that everybody who had the one should also have the other.

“With this end in view I asked the trustees of this church to agree to purchase a few copies of the ‘Temple Melodies,’ a small book of hymns, the music for which was to be selected by Mr. Jones and myself, and in which I interested the publishing house of Mason Bros.

364“Connected with this was a curious incident. Mason Bros. would not publish the book unless we would pay for the stereotype plates; and the trustees agreed to take a certain number of copies of the book—enough to cover the cost of the plates—so that the publishers should suffer no loss. When the book came to be published there was an acknowledgment of the services of Mr. Jones, but my name was not mentioned. Although I did not care particularly about that, I was curious to know how it should happen that Mr. Jones, conductor of music in my church, was personally mentioned, and I, who had given to the work time and influence, and who had obtained means with which to pay for the plates, was not mentioned at all. Though I was the father of the book, everybody else got a slice of the credit, and I was left without a crumb. I asked Jones how it was, and, blushing up to his ears, he said (if you will pardon the adjective) that the publishers said that they would not have the name of a d—d abolitionist in their book.

“This was the first step in that direction. The success of the undertaking was such as to satisfy me that a larger endeavor of the same sort would be successful also; and I went to work and laid the foundation for the ‘Plymouth Collection.’ It was to be published by Mr. A. S. Barnes, but it was necessary that there should be a guarantee in the form of an advance sufficiently large to pay for the plates, that the publishers might run no risk in issuing the book. Mr. Henry C. Bowen and Mr. James Freeland agreed to furnish the money, with the understanding that when the income, if there was one, from our copyright should equal the amount they had advanced, with interest, all further profits from the copyright should inure to the benefit of the choir of this church.

“The book has been a profitable one on the whole; but I know not how much the choir has ever received from it. There was no written agreement, and the memorandum lapsed. I forgot to make any arrangement for myself. The consequence was that I was left out in the cold, and never got a penny for my services in the matter. I do not care for that. The object for which I was eager and earnest was to procure for the churches a book of hymns and tunes, so that they should have both before them at the same time.

“The book was assailed, but was defended, and it made its way.

365“Since that time there have been eight or ten books of the same general character adopted, and they have so exactly copied the ‘Plymouth Collection’ as to size, type, and form that you may take the eight or ten volumes and set them on a shelf, and unless a man stood close to them he could not tell one from the other. So that the ‘Plymouth Collection’ not only has been a good book for this church, but has been a good pattern for other churches to follow. Although it was the first one of its kind, it was so well adapted to the want of the community that it has not been deemed expedient to change in the least degree its form, nor to change, except to a very small extent, its method. It has invariably proved to be a book acceptable and well suited to the purpose for which it was designed. It was made on a theory of my own, or rather it was the result of my observation and experience. I had observed what hymns appealed to the imagination and the affections of the people; and I did not believe that any hymn-book would ever be popular which had not in it hymns the elements of which appealed to these faculties. I had observed, also, what tunes the people loved. I had observed that any music, however irregular or grotesque, that appealed to their imagination and affection, they would adopt and make their own. Guided by that observation, I introduced into the book a great many melodies of a kind that were unknown in the sobriety of the old-fashioned psalmody, but that have been developed more fully and skilfully in subsequent books.

“With that conception of what a hymn-book should be, I was very much shocked in a conversation with Mr. Lowell Mason, whose services to American music cannot be over-estimated, and who has gone to a higher choir, but who in his old age fell upon a theory that I thought to be as vicious as it could possibly be—the theory, namely, that all music should be of one character, and that the tune should be the main thing. He said to me one day: ‘I think a perfect hymn-tune is one to which you ought to be able to sing every psalm in the whole collection.’ I considered that simply monstrous, literalizing and Platonizing everything. His late books lost ground a great deal because they were so insuperably flat. A man might sing them to all eternity and not find in them anything which hooked on to his memory or affections, or anything that had a tendency to develop his higher nature.

366“About twenty years ago Mr. Love, of Chicago—who has conferred great benefit upon churches and schools by his compositions—and I were riding together from Brooklyn to Boston, and we discussed this question of music. He was under the influence of Mr. Mason, and partook of his views on the subject, and I blew him up soundly and told him how preposterous I thought they were. He went home pondering what I said, and subsequently, as I afterward heard, cut out from a newspaper the verses beginning ‘My days are gliding swiftly by,’ and with that conversation in his mind he sat down and wrote the ‘Shining Shore’ to go with them. Whether this tune has justified my idea or not, it has been employed in this congregation for many years. Moreover, it was taken by the Brooklyn Fourteenth Regiment to the war, it was performed by their band, and whenever they gave anything like a serenade in the army the ‘Shining Shore’ was called for. Since that time this tune has been played and sung all over the continent. How great a favorite it has been here you know.”

This collection was vehemently attacked by one of the religious papers of the day in the lead, several others following, and was vigorously defended by Mr. Beecher in a series of articles in the Independent over his well-known signature, the *. So simple a matter as bringing out a hymn-book for the use of his own church, and only for others so far as they chose, would hardly seem likely to call out so strong a protest, but it shows the position that he had already come to occupy in the public mind. With his advanced views and strong following, everything that he did demanded examination, must be sifted and probably marked dangerous. In the vigorous defence of this child of his heart he discourses at length upon hymns. We have room for only two or three extracts:

“Hymns are the exponents of the inmost piety of the Church. They are crystalline tears, or blossoms of joy, or holy prayers, or incarnated raptures. They are the jewels which the Church has worn; the pearls, the diamonds, and precious stones formed into amulets more potent against sorrow and sadness than the most famous charms of wizard or magician. And he who knows the way that hymns flowed knows where the blood of piety ran, and can trace its veins and arteries to the very heart.

Henry Ward Beecher in 1850.

“Oftentimes when, in the mountain country, far from noise 368and interruption, we wrought upon these hymns for our vacation tasks, we almost forgot the living world, and were lifted up by noble lyrics as upon mighty wings, and went back to the days when Christ sang with His disciples, when the disciples sang too, as in our churches they have almost ceased to do. Oh! but for one moment, even, to have sat transfixed and to have listened to the hymn that Christ sang and to the singing! But the olive-trees did not hear His murmured notes more clearly than, rapt in imagination, we have heard them!

“There, too, are the hymns of St. Ambrose and many others, that rose up like birds in the early centuries, and have come flying and singing all the way down to us. Their wing is untired yet, nor is the voice less sweet now than it was a thousand years ago.

“There are Crusaders’ hymns, that rolled forth their truths upon the Oriental air, while a thousand horses’ hoofs kept time below and ten thousand palm-leaves whispered and kept time above! Other hymns, fulfilling the promise of God that His saints should mount up with wings as eagles, have borne up the sorrows, the desires, and the aspirations of the poor, the oppressed, and the persecuted, of Huguenots, of Covenanters, and of Puritans, and winged them to the bosom of God.

“In our own time, and in the familiar experiences of daily life how are hymns mossed over and vine-clad with domestic associations!

“One hymn hath opened the morning in ten thousand families, and dear children with sweet voices have charmed the evening in a thousand places with the utterance of another. Nor do I know of any steps now left on earth by which one may so soon rise above trouble or weariness as the verses of a hymn and the notes of a tune. And if the angels that Jacob saw sang when they appeared, then I know that the ladder which he beheld was but the scale of divine music let down from heaven to earth.”

We must find room for his answer to the charge of having left out from Watts “fifteen splendid hymns,” whose first lines are mentioned. After accounting for five of them by showing that they were left out because others of Watts’s versions of the same Psalms, and better ones, have been selected, he goes on to say: “Next in the list the ——— charges that we have omitted Watts’s hymn, ‘Glory to Thee, my God, this night.’ This evening 369hymn, dear to thousands of hearts, was probably written before Watts was born, certainly before he had written his psalms and hymns, by Bishop Ken, who was thirty-seven years old when Watts was born, and who died when Watts was but thirty-six years old. There is not, perhaps, another hymn in the language which it would require such ignorance to ascribe to Dr. Watts. To make the blunder full-orbed, it turns out that the hymn is not omitted, after all, from ‘Plymouth Collection,’ but may be found at page 416, hymn 1287.

“The next omission from Watts charged by the ——— is the hymn ‘While my Redeemer’s near.’ We left that hymn out from Watts because Dr. Watts left it out himself, not thinking it honest, we suppose, to insert a hymn before it was written, or to appropriate another author’s labors as his own. For this hymn was written by Mrs. Steele, I know not how many years after Watts’s death. How dearly this critic must have loved Watts!

“We are next charged with excluding from ‘Plymouth Collection’ the hymn of Watts, ‘God is our Refuge and Defence.’ Alas! this hymn is by Montgomery, and not by Watts at all.

“How precious Watts’s hymns must be to a man who cannot tell a Steele or a Montgomery from a Watts! With what grief must one be afflicted at the injury done to Watts by not ascribing to him Bishop Ken’s hymns? Why did not the ——— go on and mention the even more glaring omissions from Watts in the ‘Plymouth Collection,’ such as ‘Ye Mariners of England, ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes,’ ‘To be or not to be’—all of which are left out of Watts and the ‘Plymouth Collection,’ and which should have attracted the learned attention of the critic of the ———.

“It is rumored that the Psalm-Book of the New School Assembly is to be revised. If so, the interests of the Church require that the editor of the ——— should be put on the committee. His accuracy, his carefulness, his profound knowledge of hymns, and especially his intelligent admiration of Dr. Watts, cannot be spared in such a labor.”

In this discussion his adversaries found out, what to this day, we think, is not well understood, that his action, however impulsive it might appear, really sprang from very clearly defined principles, which could be justified whenever, wherever, and by whom attacked, and that, however careless he seemed, he had a 370habit of making himself thoroughly acquainted with the matter in hand, and was prepared to meet any antagonist. Mr. Beecher had great boldness and perfect confidence in his conclusions, and was willing to stand alone upon them, because he had thought them out and settled the matter once for all.

From the kindly manner in which he had often spoken of the Episcopal Church, his mother’s communion, and in his account of the effect which the service had upon him at Stratford-on-Avon, it might seem that he would attempt to bring some form of it into use in Plymouth Church; but no movement in that direction was ever made, and he appears to have been well satisfied with the possibilities that lay in the simple forms of his own order. He has several articles at different times upon a proposed “Congregational Liturgy,” but advocates no change of method, only an improvement of spirit. “Our services are barren, not from any want of common forms of devotion, but from the want of common sympathy. A church has a right to the gifts of every one of its members, and the minister is set to disclose and develop them. He is not to lean upon the strong, or avail himself alone of the services of those already developed. It is his office to take hold of every individual man, and to educate him, so that he may bring forth the one, or five, or ten talents which are committed to him for the use and profit of all his brothers. A man of books, a man of ideas, a man of sermons, is not Christ’s idea of a minister. ‘Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.’ A minister is a man of men. He is an inspirer and driller of men.... But a dead church with a liturgy on top is like a sand desert covered with artificial bouquets. It is bright for the moment. But it is fictitious and fruitless. There are no roots to the flowers. There is no soil for the roots. The utmost that a liturgy can do upon the chilly bosom of an undeveloped, untrained church is to cover its nakedness with a faint shadow of what they fain would have but cannot get....

“As to ‘surpliced boys,’ we have them already. The whole congregation is a choir, and our boys, bright and happy, unite and respond with the elders; so the surplice which they wear is just that thing which the dear mother threw over them when they left her.

“If we were disposed to use any liturgy, we know of no one which we should sooner employ than that which expressed the earliest religious feelings of our own mother, now in heaven. 371The mere fact that she had used and loved it would for ever make it sacred to us. We never hear it pronounced by a sincere and earnest man without deriving profit from it ourselves; and we have no doubt that others are benefited by its use. We do not, however, believe that its continual use as the only vehicle of expression of the religious feeling of the congregation would be as profitable, on the whole, as an extemporaneous worship. If we did we should use a liturgy. While, then, we decline to use it in public, because we think it, on the whole, less edifying than the usage of Congregational churches, we do it without wishing to detract from its intrinsic excellence, and without wounding the feelings of those who delight to use it.”

At this time he takes pains to contradict the report that he had spoken slightingly of the Episcopalian forms in saying that “he would as soon go a-courting with his father’s old love-letters as to go to church and carry a book to pray out of”:

“So far from its being true that the remark in this story was applied to the Episcopal or any other liturgy, it was applied to what are called extemporaneous prayers in Congregational and Presbyterian prayer-meetings. We were reprehending the practice of praying without sincerity or real religious feeling. We said that when men began to lead in public prayer they should be simple, truthful, and strictly individual, expressing their own wants or feelings with child-like truthfulness. We commented upon the undeniable fact that men too often borrowed their prayers, copying the elder or deacon or minister, not to express real feelings, but as forms. Thus extemporaneous prayers became hereditary. And it was in reference to these unwritten forms of prayer, in our own Congregational churches, that the remark imputed to us was made. It was not a fling at the Episcopal service. We never indulge in such remarks at the expense of other denominations, and never intend to do it. We regard the whole practice of railing at other sects or their religious usages, from the pulpit, as not only unchristian but discourteous and ungentlemanly.”

The year 1857 was one of great commercial trouble through the country. Many of his people were involved and became bankrupt. This gave him much uneasiness from his sympathy with them, and to some extent affected his health, which he alludes to in a letter to his brother later in the year:

372“I do not think it safe for me to undertake so much work this winter. My head is already suffering from overwork and anxiety induced by commercial troubles among my people. God will in the end make it a greater blessing than their prosperity.”

A family affliction which he felt very keenly, both in his personal affection and in sympathy with those who were bereaved, added to his burden. In a letter to the Independent, July 16, 1857, he says:

“The writer has been called by the stroke of violence to part with three nephews within two weeks—two of them of one age—dying, one in New Hampshire, and the others in Ohio.

“Two sons of Dr. Talbot Bullard, of Indianapolis, Ind.—Henry, aged thirteen, and Frank, aged eighteen—were thrown with the cars over an embankment, and died the same day.

“Nobler, truer, more gentle, and more amiable natures never were. Just a moment before the accident one of them said to a gentleman by their side: ‘In a few moments we shall be at home.’ They were indeed nearer home than they thought.

“Henry E. B. Stowe was the eldest son of his father’s family.family. On the 9th of July, while bathing in the Connecticut River, he was drowned. But we sorrow not as those without hope: his race was quickly run.”

We are not surprised, therefore, that we detect in most of the letters of this year a tinge of sadness accompanied with increased spiritual tenderness, as if he were finding the sources of consolation for himself, that he might lead others to them.

Lenox was found to be so far from Brooklyn that it was given up as a summer home, and this year, 1857, he spends his vacation at Matteawan, on the Hudson. His first letter gives us this bit of characteristic description:

“We are living in a pleasant old house, around which fruit-trees have grown in which birds have bred and lived unmolested from year to year. It is but a dozen wing-beats from the trees to the mountain woods. Nothing can please a meditative bird better than to have domestic scenes on one side and the seclusion of the wilderness on the other. A bird loves a kind of shy familiarity. Here we have a garden, a door-yard, an orchard, and a barn grouped together; and they on the other side have the young forests of scooped mountain-side. So the birds come 373down here for fun and go up there for reflection. This is their world; that is their cathedral.”

“In the Mountain and the Closet” he is speaking out of his own experience:

“The influences which brood upon the soul in such a covert as the closet are not like the coarse stimulants of earthly thought. The soul rises to its highest nature and meets the influences that rest upon it from above. What are its depths of calmness, what is the vision of faith, what is the rapture, the ecstasy of love, the closet knows more grandly than all other places of human experience.”

It is not all sadness even in this year of the minor key. In August we have a long article upon “Hours of Exaltation,” in which he gives us some of those higher experiences which were common to him:

“... We are filled with the very affluence of peacefulness and joy. There is neither sorrow, nor want, nor madness, nor trouble in the wide world. The glory of the Lord, that at other times hangs upon the horizon like embattled clouds full gorgeous with the sun, on such days as we have described descends and fills the whole earth. The impassioned language of the psalmists and prophets, which on other days is lifted up so high above our imaginations that we can scarcely hear it, now comes down and sounds all its grandeur in our ears. The mountains do praise the Lord; the trees clap their hands. The clouds are His chariot and bear Him through the air, leaving brightness and joy along their path. The birds know their King. The flowers lift up their hands, and with the silent tongue of perfume praise God with choice odors. The whole earth doth praise Thee.”

In September of this year he visits Litchfield with his father—the latter for the first time since he had moved to Boston—and writes a letter upon “An Aged Pastor’s Return”:

“A man past eighty going through the streets, to visit all the fathers and mothers in Israel that had been young in his ministry there, was a scene not a little memorable. One patriarch in his ninety-ninth year, when his former pastor came into the room, spoke not a word, but rose up and, putting his trembling arms around his neck, burst into tears....”

“The particular errand that brought us hither was a lecture. A new organ was to be bought. All Litchfield boys were permitted 374to help. Our contribution was asked in the shape of a lecture. My part was soon done. Then the aged pastor came forward. A crowd of old and young gathered at the pulpit-stairs to greet the hand that had baptized them or had broken to them the bread of life. It was a scene of few words. One woman gave her name, but was not recognized in her married name. She then mentioned her maiden name. That touched a hidden spring. Both burst into tears, but spoke no words. The history came up instantly before both, but silently, which had occasioned the preaching of those sermons upon intemperance whose influence for good will never cease.”

And now he points to one of the dangers which he has learned to avoid, and opens to us some of the lessons which he has himself learned from the experiences of this year:

“Many troubles in life cease when we cease to nurse them.

“Many troubles are but the strain which we endure when God would carry us the right way and we insist upon going the wrong. Troubles come to us like mire and filth, but when well mingled they change to flower and fruit.

“It should be borne in mind and thought of with thankfulness that although a heavy pecuniary pressure has been resting on the community, nothing perishes. No ships will rot, as under embargo; stores will not go down; not a wheel will rust, but only rest; the railroads, whose creation has cost us so much, are created, and will not go back but thunder on. Not an acre will go again to the forest; not a seed will rot.

“We shall hold the substantial elements gained, losing no art, no science, no ideas, no habits, no skill, no industry, nothing but a little temporary comfort; and for that we shall receive back steadiness, safety, reality, and consolation worth a thousand-fold.”

That there had been no diminution of the prosperity of the church appears from an announcement in one of the New York papers of the annual pew-renting, which took place January 7 of the following year:

“The membership of Plymouth Church was never so large as at present, and the size of the congregation is undiminished. The building admits of an audience of about three thousand persons, and it is not an uncommon occurrence on a pleasant Sunday evening for fully as great a number as this to go away from 375the church-doors, unable to get even standing-room within the walls.”

If the year 1857 was one of sadness, that of 1858 was one of rejoicing. The sowing with tears was followed by the reaping with joy. Never in the history of our country were revivals of religion so frequent, so deep and wide-spread, as in the year that followed the great financial disasters of 1857. The shattering of men’s hopes of wealth, the disturbance and destruction of their confidence in material things, was followed by a very general turning to those things that endure. From a little book entitled “The Revival in Plymouth Church,” published anonymously, from the testimony of those who were active at that time, and from letters and sermons besides, we get a very clear idea of the part which Mr. Beecher took in this great work and the methods he pursued. Near the close of the year preceding he had received a letter from a young man in New York, who described himself as slowly but surely sinking beneath the temptations which he could not escape, and who implored help from the destruction that hung over him. He said, “Preach to me the terrors of the law, anything to arouse me from this fearful lethargy.” Mr. Beecher read the appeal to his audience, and answered it by preaching on the love of God in Jesus Christ as the only remedy for man’s sin and the only power for his salvation, and said: “If this remedy fails I know of no other. If love will not save you, fear will be of no avail.” He then led the congregation in a most earnest and tender prayer for that young man and for the great multitude which he represented.

It was by such means as this, enlisting the feeling of his audience in specific cases, awakening and directing the sympathies of the church, that the work began. He disclaimed any confidence in a revival, born of mere excitement, carefully explained God’s methods in saving men, and threw the whole responsibility for success upon Christians. If their hearts were filled with the love of God the influence would be felt with power by those around them.

On the last Sabbath in February he preached upon the reasonableness, usefulness, and Scriptural nature of revivals, combated objections against them, and finally brought it home to the conscience of his people: “Ought you not to have a revival?”

On the next Sabbath, at the communion season, he preached 376upon the words, “For so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,” holding up before his people with great clearness and tenderness the privileges and the infinite rewards of patient, Christian following and labor. The father, who assisted at the service which followed, expressed the feeling of many hearts when, in his prayer, he said: “Lord, we thank Thee for the opening out of Thy word this morning; we have been brought very near heaven; we see not how we can be any nearer till we stand within the very gates.”

On the Wednesday evening following, at the usual weekly lecture, he spoke to a crowded audience upon the conversion of the Philippian jailer. It was a service of confession of the lack of faith in the ever-present grace of God, of instruction concerning the spirit and methods of the apostles, and of guidance to any who were seeking light and peace. A prayer-meeting followed, at which any who desired prayers for themselves or others were given opportunity to make their desire known, and the work was begun.

“Morning meetings were opened daily, and were attended by ever-increasing numbers, while so many remained afterward for instruction that the pastor’s work was rarely over before eleven or twelve o’clock. He called in lieutenants of both sexes, who helped him in the work. No one who attended on those occasions can ever forget the fascinating mixture of tenderness, earnestness, pathos, dry humor, quick wit, and sound common sense that ran through all the instruction of those meetings. One would be told to pray; another, whose knees were almost worn out and whose mind was diseased with useless anxiety, was told in the next breath to stop praying and go to sweeping; the many timid and shrinking ones were encouraged into freedom, while one or two, who thought that all the angels were anxiously awaiting the news of their conversion before the business of heaven could proceed, were taken down by a little quiet humor that cured yet did not wound; and all alike were brought into the one fold. Under such influences and instructions three hundred and thirty-five persons united with the church this season.

“The morning prayer-meeting has been in Plymouth Church emphatically a ‘love-feast,’ the attractive influences being love to Christ, to the pastor, and to one another in full and lively 377exercise. No better description of these meetings can be given than that of a happy and united family gathering together, under the guidance of a beloved and honored father, for morning worship. No wonder that men as they passed along the street, though unused to a prayer-meeting, could not resist the voice of song which fell on their ear daily in the sweet morning hour; and no wonder that, once having entered, they should be fascinated by the scene which met their eye and warmed by the atmosphere of love which they breathed, and should return saying: ‘Surely God is in this place, though we knew it not; this is indeed the house of God, and this is none other than the gate of heaven.’ There was no such feeling as that smiles, or even an honest laugh, were sinful; smiles and tears mingled in curious proximity, without any attempt at restraint; in short, everything was natural.

“At the close of a meeting, when, owing to the quaintness of speech of some of the brethren, especially the newly-awakened ones, in the relation of their varied experiences, we had laughed and cried alternately, the one as heartily as the other, Mr. Beecher said: ‘I call you to witness whether this has not been a good meeting, whether there has not been a tender spirit among us, and whether the influence of the Holy Ghost has not been here? I say this because, as you know, many persons entertain the opinion that laughing is quite inexpedient on such occasions as these and a sure means of grieving away the Spirit. Bear this meeting in mind, and let it be your answer to the charge of irreverence whenever it may be brought against us on this score.’”

He gave one of his own experiences:

“You know that my usual frame of mind is hopefulness. I am apt to look at the bright side of things and take cheerful views of life. On this very account an occasional experience of sadness is an inexpressible luxury to me. Last night, I know not why, but I could not sleep for some hours. I lay restlessly, turning from side to side, till this morning between one and two. No sooner was I asleep than it seemed to me I was in an Episcopal church, robed in black, where a clergyman was celebrating the Lent service. By and by he ascended the pulpit and began to speak. There was no eloquence in his language, nor anything particularly striking in his mode of dealing with his subject, but 378his heart was evidently in it. He was setting forth in simple language the sufferings of Jesus, and as I listened there seemed to rise up before me a vivid conception of the Saviour in His last agony on Calvary. I gazed till the tears gushed from my eyes, and I awoke to find my pillow soaking wet. I composed myself again to sleep, and my imagination took up the stitch just where I had dropped it, and knitted on. I beheld the same vision, and again the tears flowed. I gazed and wept until it seemed to me as if my very soul would dissolve and the fountain of tears be itself exhausted. Again I awoke, and, again falling asleep, the vision was for the third time repeated, and I seemed to weep my very life away. I know not when I had before such a sweet, rich experience of the love of my Saviour; and when I awoke finally this morning, it was with a tenderness of soul I cannot well describe. I was thankful I did not sleep sooner, and that when I did sleep I made such good use of my time.”

Opportunity was given at these meetings to any who wished to ask the brethren to pray for themselves or for others, and was largely used. A little before the close of the meeting Mr. Beecher would rise, and, taking the slips of paper that covered his table, read from them aloud. After reading these he would ask, “Are there any here who desire to make requests on behalf of their friends?” And then when these had all been made he would say, “Are there any who desire to ask on their own account?” Then having caught the eye of each as they arose, and acknowledged the request by a slight inclination of the head, in token of recognition, until they ceased rising, “in a low, soft tone would come the words, ‘Let us unite in prayer,’ and instantly every head was bowed. The prayers which followed these scenes were the most precious opportunities of communion with the Lord Jesus Christ which we were ever permitted to enjoy. We believe that he who uttered them was taught of the Holy Ghost, and that he spake as the Spirit gave him utterance. There was an exuberance of faith and love in these utterances not usually found in prayer; a gladness on the part of the speaker, and a recognized consciousness of gladness on the part of Christ. They were the breathings of love into a loving ear.” “We always concluded with a hymn, for Mr. Beecher was wont to say that he liked to send us away with a full tide of song, and for a long time our 379choice for concluding hymns lay between ‘Shining Shore’ and ‘Homeward Bound.’”

March 27, 1858, Mr. Beecher gave a twenty-minute address in Burton’s old theatre in Chambers Street at the noon prayer-meeting. “I wish to leave the impression that the matter of salvation is a matter between your own heart and the Lord Jesus Christ; that there is between you a sympathy so plain that there is no need of any interference. You may become a Christian now, and go home to your household and be enabled to ask a blessing at your table to-day.”

Letters are frequent this year upon subjects like this, “Trust in God”:

“We ought not to forget that an affectionate, confiding, tender faith, habitually exercised, would save us half the annoyances of life, for it would lift us above the reach of them. If an eagle were to fly low along the ground every man might aim a dart at it; but when it soars into the clouds it is above every arrow’s reach. And they that trust in God ‘shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.’”

About this time he answers a criticism that appeared in several papers upon the extravagant income of Plymouth Church:

“It is easy to stand off and rail. Will any one suggest a plan by which five thousand men can be put into a church that can hold only three thousand?

“The poor should be held in lively remembrance. But ought we to provide for the poor in a way that shall punish those who are not poor?...

“In closing we will only say that from the beginning no church ever more conscientiously endeavored to give the Gospel to all classes, rich and poor, resident or strangers. For ten years the members of this society have cheerfully submitted to an inconvenience, for the sake of the poor and of strangers, such as has rarely had a parallel. Gentlemen have paid hundreds of dollars for pews which were, with the exception of a single Sabbath in the year, more or less filled with the poor.

“Every Sabbath day families who have paid hundreds of dollars for a pew, coming to church, find it pre-occupied by the poor and the stranger, and it is a rare exception that in such cases there is any irritation.

380“Generally the owner, distributing his family as best he can, takes a seat in the aisle or stands in the entry. And this is not an occasional thing. It is the regular experience of the congregation, year after year.”

The year 1859 opens with some very characteristic letters from Mr. Beecher. He had been charged with having held the doctrine of total depravity up to ridicule in a lecture which he delivered in Boston. This brings from him a letter, two or three passages of which we here transcribe:

“But although we did not employ the phrase total depravity in any opprobrious sense at the time mentioned, we do not hesitate to say that we regard it as one of the most unfortunate and misleading terms that ever afflicted theology....

“On the other hand, we do believe, with continual sorrow of heart and daily overflowing evidence, in the deep sinfulness of universal man.... We heartily hate the phrase total depravity, and never feel inclined to use it except when reading the ethics of ——— or the religious editorials of ———.”

He was shortly after this attacked for lecturing in a “Fraternity Course” in the same city. This calls out a long answer upon “Working with Errorists,” in which he says:

“I have long ago been convinced that it was better to love men than to hate them, that one would be more likely to convince them of wrong belief by showing a cordial sympathy with their welfare than by nipping and pinching them with logic. And although I do not disdain but honor philosophy applied to religion, I think that the world just now needs the Christian heart more than anything else. And even if the only and greatest question were the propagation of the right theology, I am confident that right speculative views will grow up faster and firmer in the summer of true Christian loving than in the rigorous winter of solid, congealed orthodoxy or the blustering March of controversy....

“If tears could wash away from Mr. Parker’s eyes the hindrances, that he might behold Christ as I behold and adore Him, I would shed them without reserve. If prayers could bring to him this vision of glory, beyond sight of philosophy, I would for him besiege the audience-chamber of heaven with an endless procession of prayers, until another voice, sounding forth from another light brighter than the noonday sun, should cast 381down another blinded man, to be lifted up an apostle with inspired vision.

“But since I may not hope so to prevail, I at least will carry him in my heart; I will cordially work with him when I can, and be heartily sorry when I cannot.

“While we yet write word comes that Mr. Parker, broken down by over-labor, seeks rest and restoration in a warmer climate. Should these lines reach his eyes let him know that one heart at least remembers his fidelity to man in great public exigencies, when so many swerved of whom we had a right to expect better things. God shield him from the ocean, the storm, the pestilence, and heal him of lurking disease! And there shall be one Christian who will daily speak his name to the heart of God in earnest prayer, that with health of body he may receive upon his soul the greatest gift of God—faith in Jesus Christ as the Divine Saviour of the world.”

Another incident calls forth a similar response:

“At the recent celebration of Tom Paine’s birthday at Cincinnati the infidels present toasted: ‘The heretic clergy, Parker, Emerson, Conway, Chapin, Beecher, and all who love man above all creeds, and sects, and rituals, and observances, who regard man as the highest and holiest and most sacred of all in the universe—may their motto be: Ever onward, greater freedom, and clearer light.’” Having disclaimed any distinction as one who loves man more than creeds, since this is “true of all Christians when they are in their most Christian disposition,” and having accepted their motto as being in line with sundry passages of Scripture, he gives his true and honest feeling towards them in these words:

“Let no man think that we despise the sympathy and well-wishing of a convention of infidels. We thank them for their kind feelings. Like our Master, we had rather discourse with publicans and sinners than dine with the most select and eminent Pharisee. But we love a true Christian better than either. But, infidel or Pharisee, all need the grace of God, and all, by repentance of sin and faith in Christ, the Saviour of sinners, may yet meet in heaven.

“Gentlemen of the Cincinnati convention of infidels! we should be ashamed to be less kind and courteous than you 382have been, and in concluding we take leave of you kindly, saying, in the words of Inspired Writ:

“‘Now may the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in you that which is well pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ. To whom be glory for ever and ever.’         *”

The setting up of a new organ in Plymouth Church this winter is thus duly announced:

“The organ long expected has arrived, been unpacked, set up, and glorified over. It has piped, fluted, trumpeted, brayed, thundered. It has played so loud that everybody was deafened, and so softly that nobody could hear.”

After speaking of the characteristics of the many organists who have tried it, and of one who was an especially brilliant player, he says: “But he was not a Christian man, and the organ was not to him a Christian instrument, but simply a grand Gothic instrument, to be studied just as a mere Protestant would study a cathedral, in the mere spirit of architecture and not at all in sympathy with its religious signification or uses. And before long he went abroad to perfect himself in his musical studies, but not till a most ludicrous event befell him. On a Christmas day a great performance was to be given. The church was full; all were musically expectant. It had been given out that something might be expected. And surely something was had a little more than was expected. For when every stop was drawn, that the opening might be with a grand choral effect, the down-pressing of his hands brought forth not only the full expected chord, but also a cat that by some strange chance had got into the organ. She went up over the top as if gunpowder had helped her. Down she plunged into the choir, to the track around the front bulwark of the gallery, until opposite the pulpit, when she dashed down one of the supporting columns, made for the broad aisle, when a little dog joined in the affray, and both went down toward the street-door at an astonishing pace. Our organist, who, on the first appearance of this element in his piece, snatched back his hands, had forgotten to relax his muscles, and was to be seen following the cat with his eyes, with his head turned, while his astonished hands stood straight out before him, rigid as marble!”

383In the spring of this year he purchased a farm in Peekskill, and explains his object as follows:

“I knew that the place was good for grass, for grain, and for fruits, of all which I talked a good deal during the preliminary approaches to a purchase, but for which I cared about as much as I should whether the inside of my boots were red or yellow.

“If the thing must be told—and I mention it to you, Mr. Bonner, confidentially—it was the remarkable aptitude of the place for eye-crops that caught my fancy. It was not so much what grew upon the place, as what you could see off from it, that won me. It is a great stand for the eye. If a man can get rich by looking, I am on the royal road to wealth. And, indeed, it is true wealth that the eye gets, and the ear and all the finer senses; riches that cannot be hoarded or squandered; that all may have in common; that come without meanness and abide without corrupting. So long as it remains true that the heavens declare the glory of God, and the earth His handiwork, so long will men find both heart wealth and strength by a reverent admiration of the one and a sympathetic familiarity with the other.”

In a letter to his daughter he describes the new home:

“... Farm—I wrote so far at home, but being interrupted have brought it up to the green hills. You will be quite ashamed to think that Matteawan ever seemed beautiful to you when you shall have seen this place. It has no wild or romantic features, but it is full of soft, nice, beautiful views. No barren fields are seen, no brown pasture-lands, no rugged hills—the very mountains in the horizon are carved into round and graceful shapes. The near hills are round, gentle, smooth, and verduous to the very top. Only one summit is rugged and wild, and we keep that in the distant foreground as a contrast to all the other graceful shapes. The river in the distance is like a lake, except the fleets of sloops and schooners give it a sense of navigation. From the top hill of the farm you can see almost as wide a prospect as from Bald Mountain in Salisbury—on the north and east, wild, mountainous, solitary; but all the rest beautiful and cultivated, with the Hudson rolling along the west. I have traced a rude diagram^[6] on the opposite page, but it will be only just 384better than nothing, though you must confess that it is exceedingly well drawn for me!

”... I heard from H——— yesterday. He is well and lively, and wrote me quite a sprightly and witty letter. W——— is round, rosy, curly, and loving as usual. B———, the rogue, is fairly recovering from a double charge of scarlet-fever and whooping-cough, and is becoming most healthfully saucy.“

Early in the autumn they returned from the country and began life again in the city. We give copies of several letters written to his daughter:

“... In the beginning let me say, my dear child, that I heartily approve of all that you have done. I am not a superstitious observer of the Sabbath, nor do I hold to the rigor either of the Jewish or the Puritan Sabbath. But I do believe that one-seventh part of our time was originally appointed for rest, for home-society, and for religious culture....

“When I was myself in Paris I acted just as I do in Brooklyn. I took no more liberties, and was quite as observant of my home proprieties. And I must say that I do not relish the idea of our young countrymen going to Europe to learn how to get rid of religious habits. Foreign travel should improve our manners, increase our information, enlarge our experience of men, enrich our imagination, cultivate our tastes, but not enervate our conscience....

“Everything is going well at the farm. I have bought a yoke of cattle, white with mottled necks and red heads; also two Ayrshire calves, and a little bull calf of the same breed. Your mother is driving away at her cheeses in the most housewifely style. She has already made, eaten, and given away two or three, and she has four or five on hand, good large ones, which are to grow old for city use. Already I imagine myself a nimble little maggot making the cheese fly. The pet ponies do bravely, the pigs are fat and flourishing, the chickens comely, and the ducks noisy but drawing very near to doom and dinner.

“I would not advise you to use wine unless you are weak and it is recommended by judicious advisers for real reasons of health; and then I should take it frankly and without hesitation. But while you do not use it, you are not bound to take it on any occasion for others’ sake. If the occasion comes, call for a glass 385of water and calmly lift that to your lips. But more of this by and by. I have no objection to your learning to dance as a part of physical education.”

The home life in Brooklyn ran undisturbed through the autumn, until, early in 1860, a serious accident befell Mrs. Beecher, which Mr. Beecher describes in the following letter:

“Good-by, old fellow. Give my love to Hattie, and tell her that her father hasn’t forgotten her,” were the first words of Mr. Beecher to me that I remember. I had been introduced to him the evening before, but he had just returned from a lecturing tour, tired and sleepy, and if he said anything brilliant it has entirely escaped my memory. I was going, in company with Mrs. Stowe’s son, to take a pedestrian tour in Europe. We expected, in time, to join her party, who were then on the Continent, and were busy getting ready to go on board ship that day. It was a hearty send off to one who was comparatively a stranger, that was very characteristic of the man.

Of course I remembered the message and gave it faithfully; and after several months’ acquaintance, travelling in Switzerland and Italy, made an addition of the same in kind on my own account, which being accepted and reciprocated, we were married September 25, 1861.

“The innumerable friends of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher would hardly forgive us if we were to omit mentioning the pleasing incident that occurred at his country residence at Peekskill last week. On Wednesday morning, after the dew was dry, Mr. Beecher chose a spot under the shadows of the trees near his garden, where, in the presence of a fit circle of friends and neighbors, he gave away his only daughter in a novel ceremony of marriage. The beauty of the day and the beauty of the ceremony together rendered the scene singularly charming, tender, and impressive.”

Of his method of making himself acquainted with the peculiar features of the villages in which he lectured, and his pleasant words concerning the people he met, the following letter is a good illustration:

As a complement to the above an experience in not lecturing is here given in full:

They heard from him at once as requested, and this was the answer:

When the title of Doctor of Divinity was offered him he declined it, as follows:

One of the peculiar features of Mr. Beecher’s work in those days of 1861-63 was the revival interest that continued, with variations of intensity, it is true, but with no substantial interruption, for years. The revival of 1858 had not entirely ceased at that time, and although those days of war, especially since he gave himself so intensely to public matters, would naturally be regarded as unfavorable to any marked religious interest, yet it continued notwithstanding, as is shown by the numbers that constantly sought admission to the church upon profession of faith. This was owing, we doubt not, to the perfect conviction of Mr. Beecher that the whole work of that time was the Lord’s, and to his entering upon it with such consecration that he was continually shielded and refreshed by experiences of the divine presence. This gave a deep practical spirituality to his preaching, which was appropriated and reflected by his church, making the Gospel attractive, in those days of trouble, as never before. Men turned to the refuge which they saw he had found, and which, with 392deepest sympathy and with abundant hopefulness, he was pointing out to them. He himself says: “It is a mistake to suppose that the preoccupation of the public mind with the war, and the great excitements which are fed by the ever-changing rumors and news, are unfavorable to the work of a true minister of the Gospel.”

The continued ingathering into Plymouth Church during all those years of the war was something almost phenomenal. One marked occasion, the May communion of 1862, was described in a newspaper of that day: “Every part of the house was densely packed. The platform and desk were decorated with vases of flowers, while banks of azaleas, magnolias, carnations, fuchsias, white lilies, roses, and other plants in blossom reached from the pulpit floor to the orchestra. After the usual exercises of singing, reading, and prayer, Mr. Beecher read a list of about eighty names of persons who were to unite with the church. Many of them were members of the Sabbath-schools and Bible-classes. Some were persons of middle age; a few were persons of advanced years. After a brief address Mr. Beecher read the articles of faith, to which the parties gave their assent. The ordinance of baptism was then administered to those who had never before received it; after which the members of the church arose and received the new members into full and cordial communion. Mr. Beecher took his text from John x. 3, 4. There had been provided memorial bouquets for each new communicant, which were distributed at the close of the services.”

These floral decorations may almost be said to have been introduced by Plymouth Church, and were justified by Mr. Beecher upon the highest moral and religious grounds. He says of “Flowers in Church”:

“They are simply the signs of gladness. They are offerings of joyful hearts to God.

“Flowers are not of man. They are divine. Man can, by culture, develop all that God has hidden in them, but can add nothing to them, nor can he invent or build them.

“God has made flowers for everybody. They are next in abundance to the great elements—air, light, water. The poorest man has a roadside flower-garden. No mission-church is so poor that it cannot afford wild flowers upon the altar and a few assorted leaves in the windows. How beautifully would woman’s 393hand light up the dreary plaster wall and frigid seats of many a church room, if permitted to garnish them with these field-thoughts of God!

“The effect upon children is well worth our thought. To teach a child to love flowers is to give him riches that no bankruptcy can reach. This is the wisdom of finding our pleasures, not in conventional arrangements, but in sympathy with nature, which never is confiscated, or goes out of fashion, or becomes old and exhausted. There is a new heaven and a new earth every day, as if suggesting that grand and final event of prophecy.

“The use of flowers on social and religious occasions soon gives to them meanings which they had not to us before. We read nature more thoughtfully and lovingly.

“Weeds change to flowers. The moment a plant inspires intelligent emotion in us it ceases to be a weed and becomes a flower. The natural world is not any longer godless or commercial and mechanical. It has a moral power.

“At first many will shrink at seeing flowers upon the speaker’s desk or on the pulpit. But why? Is the place too holy? But is it holier than God? And are not flowers His peculiar workmanship? If God deemed it suitable to His dignity and glory to occupy His mind with making and preserving such innumerable flowers, are we wise in disdaining them or considering the place too sacred for God’s favorites? Do men reflect that God has been pleased to name Himself from flowers? ‘I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley.’”

In line with this are his views upon “Christian Liberty in the Use of the Beautiful”:

“I cannot but think Christian men have not only a right of enjoyment in the beautiful, but a duty, in some measure, of producing it, or propagating it, or diffusing it abroad through the community.

“But in all your labors for the beautiful, remember that its mission is not of corruption, nor of pride, nor of selfishness, but of benevolence! And as God hath created beauty, not for a few, but hath furnished it for the whole earth, multiplying it until, like drops of water and particles of air, it abounds for every living thing, and in measure far transcending human want, until the world is a running-over cup, so let thine heart understand both the glory of God’s beauty and the generosity of its distribution. 394So living, life shall be a glory, and death a passing from glory to glory.”

If we have supposed that his love for nature was intuitive or came to its fulness without effort or study, the following letter will correct that impression:

“We are performing not alone a work of love in commending Ruskin, but paying a small part of a debt that can never be discharged. We are more indebted to him for the blessings of sight than to all other men. We were, in respect to nature, of the number of those who, having eyes, saw not; and ears, heard not. He taught us what to see and how to see. Thousands of golden hours and materials both for self-enjoyment and the instruction of others, enough to fill up our whole life, we owe to the spirit excited in us by the reading of Ruskin’s early works.

“The sky, the earth, and the waters are no longer what they were to us.

“We have learned a language and come to a sympathy in them more through the instrumentality of Ruskin’s works than by all other instrumentalities on earth, excepting always the nature which my mother gave me—sainted be her name!”

We have again come to the point, 1863, which we once before reached in this biography, but this time upon entirely different lines. In our first examination, for the sake of unity of impression, we confined ourselves to the events of the great anti-slavery conflict. In this which we have just completed we have sketched the outline of other labors and the events of his home life during this period. No one, we suspect, reading the first record, the record of strife and battle, would conceive it possible that a life so full of all manner of peaceful pursuits and home labors was being lived; nor, on the other hand, would any one going over his work of preaching, lecturing, writing helpful Star articles upon all manner of common subjects, imagine that he had the time or the spirit for the former work. But, in fact, in his case they were each the necessary complement of the other.

We have seen how, at the West in the midst of continued revival efforts, he took up the study of landscape-gardening as an alterative. This was an illustration of his habit through life. In the midst of the most exciting events he would escape and go apart from them all, if possible, to some point where he could 395look out upon the landscape or up to the clear heavens. Such places at such times seemed to become Mountains of Transfiguration, where he would meet the Master and be refreshed by His presence, and whence returning he would bring back a store of beautiful experiences that enabled him to give cheer and inspiration to his fellow-toilers, who had not, perhaps, noted his absence from their side. Or he would escape to some quiet nook and hold converse with birds and flowers, delight himself in quaint and pleasant fancies, look at life from a new standpoint, until he was able again to take up the burden without weariness; or he would sit down with his boxes of seeds or catalogues of plants, and lose himself in their imagined growth and beauty; or, drawing from his pocket some one of the precious stones he always carried with him, gather rest and inspiration as he watched its changing hues.

In this way he was enabled to carry on the most various and exhaustive labors, and at the same time to preserve that mental health and good cheer for which he was remarkable.

Visit to England in 1863—The Need of Rest—Condition of Affairs at Home—Arrival at Liverpool—Refusal to Speak—Visit to the Continent—Reception by the King of Belgium—Civil War Discussed—News of Victories—Return to England.

The spring of 1863 found Mr. Beecher thoroughly exhausted and greatly in need of both mental and physical rest. The past twelve years had been a season of unremitting care and toil. In addition to the regular duties of his new and growing church, and the active revival work carried on at this period, which were quite enough to task the energies of any one less fortunately endowed with mental and vital energy, he had taken a very active part in the anti-slavery agitation, and from the pulpit, the lecture platform, and the columns of the Independent kept up a constant fire upon this national evil. In 1856, as we have seen, he had thrown himself heart and soul into the Fremont campaign, well-nigh destroying his health. From 1860 he had been laboring, without rest, to uphold the government, to rouse and maintain the patriotic confidence of the North, and through all of this time was a contributor to the New York Independent, and since 1861 its editor-in-chief. Fagged out and despondent from exhaustion, rest was imperative.

His church, with that generous love which has always characterized it, voted him a four months’ leave of absence with expenses paid.

In company with Dr. John Raymond, then the president of Vassar College, a warm personal friend, he set sail early in June for a holiday, making his second trip across the water.

Fortunately we are able to give almost wholly in his own words the history of this trip:

“I left New York in June, 1863, for a tour through Europe during the summer vacation. I was not requested, either by President Lincoln nor by any member of the Cabinet, to act in behalf of this government; it was purely a personal arrangement. 397The government took no stock in me at that time. Seward was in the ascendency, and, as I had been pounding Lincoln during the early years of the war, I don’t believe there was a man in Washington, excepting perhaps Mr. Chase, who would have trusted me with anything; at any rate, I went on my own responsibility, with no one behind me except my church. They told me they would pay my expenses and sent me off. I went away wholly for the sake of rest and recuperation. I went simply as a private citizen, and I went with a determination not to speak in Great Britain.

“It was perhaps the dreariest period in the whole war. One after another of our generals had been sent to school in the field to learn the art of generalship. The task was too large for most of them, and they took a secondary rank. At that time, up to the date of my departure, we had made a stand and maintained it, but had gained but very little. The most defensible country, perhaps, on earth is our own in its southern portion; and the line that ran two thousand miles of active warfare through our middle had been so fortified, and was defended with such skill and unquestionable bravery, that our forces had not been able to push back the line of rebellion much, and there had been nothing to encourage the hearts of our people beyond their faith—for we lived by faith and not by sight in those days.

“I had not, except in times of sickness, when the whole tone of my nervous system was lowered, had an hour of doubt. I was sure of victory. There were some sick hours in which I remember distinctly thinking, ‘One nation is ground to make soil for another, and it may be that this nation will be ground up in order that another one may grow up on its ruins’; but ordinarily I was full of courage and hope, not unfounded I think now in review; and it stood me in good stead abroad.

“At that time Grant had not emerged. McClellan had, and had retired again. Burnside had briefly shown that he was too modest and not strong enough to take McClellan’s place. Hooker, who had lost his head in the great battle which he fought, was at the head of affairs, and we were on the eve of one more change—a change which has surrounded the name of Meade with lustre. Grant was at the time besieging Vicksburg. Lee had not yet ventured into Pennsylvania, out of which he never ought to have been permitted to go.

398“It was at about that stage of things that I left. The political condition of the country, and also its civic and secular condition, will justify a word or two. There was a great party of the Union, made up of men indifferently from all foregoing parties. Old lines were effaced, old questions sank to the bottom, and the one question that united the strangest elements, discordant in every other respect, was the wise determination to maintain intact the union of this whole country. That formed the band and belt that gave unity to the party of war. The great Democratic party was divided into three ranks. The largest part, and the noblest, joined themselves to the party of the Union; and better men never came from any party than those that formed under our banner, bearing briefly and for a time the name of Republicans, but very largely going back again, after the war was over, to the Democratic party. There was a second division of lukewarm Unionists in the Democratic party, that were always hoping the war would be compromised—men of great patriotism, who could not forbear to ask: ‘What will be my position politically when we shall have secured peace again?’ They were for compromise and for easy adjustment.

“Now, war is good for nothing if it is not intense and cruel. It means organized force; and it is nonsense to go into the field with anything else except guns in your hands and swords at your side. The attempt so to fight, as in the earlier periods of our struggle, as not to hurt anybody, is most disastrous, whether in prudence or in civil successes. The South never did make war except to hurt somebody; and in the earlier day the vehemence, the courage, and the convictions which they brought into the field, made them more than a match for our Northern soldiers. Very largely our generals had anticipations of Congress, or the Presidency, or what not, before them; and such political anticipations never whet anybody’s sword.

“There was a third section, and that was the least—those that were directly in league with the Southern and slavery element. Of them it is not necessary that anything should be said. They are wiped out, and that is fulfilled in regard to them which the Scriptures hath spoken: ‘The name of the wicked shall rot.’

“In that divided state Lincoln was under great discouragements, yet maintaining invincible his purpose, without compromise, to destroy all oppositions to this Union. Meanwhile 399we were maintaining a blockade of about three thousand miles—an unexampled blockade. We had to extemporize a navy, as we shall again if we have any war. We are always wise afterward. For the sake of economy we are the most wasteful of all nations, without foresight in such matters; too confiding. There is not a ship in the American navy to-day that could not be blown out of the water in a ten minutes’ conflict with the best-armored ships of Europe; and Congress, that has no end of money for votes, through pensions and various other channels of distributing, cannot be persuaded to do anything for stability and inexorable defence against foreign invasion and warfare.

“We had at that time converted almost every sea-going craft into a man-of-war; and this extended blockade was in the main well served. Europe stood watching as a vulture does to see the sick lamb or kine stagger to fall, and from her dried branch of observation she was ready to plunge down. Napoleon did. He already had sent French armies into Mexico. That was a mere preface. Mexico was not his final object. The recovering again of territory that once had belonged to France lay in the achievements or the expectations of this weak and wicked potentate in the future.

“In this condition of things we were hovering on the very edge of intervention. It was well known to those acquainted with the condition of affairs in other lands that Napoleon was disposed by every art and intrigue to persuade the government of Great Britain to interpose, to break the blockade, and to give its moral support to the rebellion of the South.

“I found in England the utmost scepticism prevailing as to our success, and an exaggerated conception of the endurance and courage of the South; and no sentence was more frequently uttered in my hearing than this, ‘You will never subdue the South’; to which I invariably replied, ‘We shall subdue the South.’

“I found that, with a few noble exceptions—Mr. John Bright, Richard Cobden, Mr. Forster, and such like—that the statesmen of Great Britain were either lukewarm or in avowed sympathy with the South. The middle-class and laboring people of Great Britain were in sympathy, on the whole, with the North; but they had no votes. As a general thing, the officeholders under the government, the rich families, the manufacturing interests, 400the educated and professional men of Great Britain, believed that our Union had been or would soon be dissolved. Some one said to me at that time, ‘All men who ride in first-class cars, and put up at first-class hotels, and live upon intellectual professions, together with most of the clergymen, even of the dissenting bodies of England, are adverse to the Northern cause.’

“The conduct of the laboring classes in Great Britain was admirable. While they were on the verge of starvation in the cotton districts, they patiently endured their sufferings without retracting their sympathy for the Northern cause. As a body, the Quakers, whose testimony against slavery had been continuous and unswerving, were in sympathy with the North. The Congregational churches of Great Britain, with few exceptions, were adverse to the North. The Congregational churches of Wales were almost wholly in sympathy with the North.

“All the world looked upon America as about to be split asunder. Here and there was a faithful witness and a faithful friend. The civilized nations of Europe looked with varying emotions upon our conflict, but agreed generally that it was an impossible task that the North had undertaken; and everywhere I felt the numbness that that produced.

“It was at just that period that I left our shores and was in Great Britain.”

From his letters home we have gathered something of an outline of his experience and first impressions:

“I reached the mouth of the Mersey, seven miles from Liverpool, on Wednesday night. The tide would not let us across till five the next morning.... Duncan was on the tug when we reached the city—for there are no wharves at Liverpool, and we lay in the middle of the stream and landed passengers by means of a little steam-tug.... Before leaving the boat a Mr. Estcourt, of Manchester, was at hand to invite me to have a reception and speech at Manchester. The same happened for Liverpool within a few hours, and letters from London, from two committees, came within a day, soliciting the same. I declined them all and declared my intention not to speak anywhere at present, and until I had had time to form some judgment of things. I find that all our American friends at Liverpool approve highly of my decision. And even those who most solicited speeches admit that they think my decision the wiser one. I will not trouble you with any 401description of the state of the English mind toward our country. We have nothing to hope from it when it might be of use to us, and we shall not by and by care a pin whether they think ill or well.” After a week’s run in the country he returned to Liverpool and “went to meet some friends at the parlor of a store. The great stores here have parlors, in which the heads of departments dine every day. Gave them a plain talk about America. At the end, as we got familiar, they confessed that America had sufficient reason for her complaints against Great Britain.”

Writing from London a week later:

“Every man I meet who is on our side commends my determination to keep quiet for the present. I do not mean in preaching, but public addresses and public receptions. There is but little favor for the North. Whatever may be said, a narrow but intense jealousy is felt, and fear of future rivalry....

”London, July 7.—On Monday of this week (yesterday) I met a circle of temperance men at a breakfast. It was private in this, that no reports were to be made or published. I gave them a good talk on our affairs.... To-day a like meeting with a section of anti-slavery men.”

He attended the meeting. Of course he was expected to make some remarks, and he did. He says, speaking of this incident: “Several speeches had been made when I was called upon, and made a statement expressing my indignation at the position of the Congregational clergy of England in view of this war. They were men who were seeking to know the signs of the times, and had as a whole body gone wrong and had virtually arrayed themselves on the side of slavery and against liberty. I put my best leg foremost, and, although I succeeded in making a favorable impression, I saw that I was likely to be regarded as an enthusiast, and so determined that I should clinch the arguments I had advanced with a speech from a calm-minded man, and accordingly when I had concluded I said: ‘Gentlemen, Dr. John Raymond, president of Vassar College, is present and will add a few views of his own.’ He was a cool man and not easily excited, but his sympathies were with the Union, and when he had kindled up to his work I sat and looked at him in perfect amazement. He went at them like a hundred earthquakes, with a whirlwind thrown in. He made a magnificent speech, of such towering indignation as I never have heard before or since.”

402The expectation that the speeches would not be reported was misplaced; there appears to have been “a chiel amang us takin’ notes,” and the substance of the speeches was quite fully reported the next day.

Almost immediately thereafter he crossed over to the Continent, and did not return to England until the following September.

He remained strongly disinclined to make any formal addresses, though he had been urged to speak in London, Liverpool, and Manchester on his return.

Writing from Switzerland, July 28, to Mrs. Stowe, he refers to the two meetings in London, and his views regarding his return in the fall:

“My time in London, where I spent ten days, was, for the last six or eight, spent in meeting private circles of gentlemen, and talking to them like a father. I breakfasted with almost a hundred from the Temperance Alliance, with seventy-five of the Congregational Liberty Association, with forty or fifty at a soirée at Mr. Evans’s, president of the Emancipation League, where Baptist Noel was the questioner, and I responded for two hours. I hear since that great good was done, and at the time there was elicited a great deal of confession from many that they had been both ignorant and wrong. There was a universal and vehement desire that I should arrange to speak in London, and elsewhere, when I return to England in the autumn. If I see the way clear to do so, these conferences will have opened the door effectually. Meanwhile I shall wait and watch the development of things.... But let me tell you that the root of all the conduct of England is simple and absolute fear. I do not mean fear of a narrow and technical kind. But the shadow that the future of our nation already casts is so vast that they foresee they are falling into the second rank—that the will of the Republic is to be the law of the world. There is no disguising of this among Englishmen.

“I was told by Rev. Henry Allen, of London, eminent among the Congregationalists, that they had long felt that a time must come when England would have to take hold of us and curb our power, and that, now that we were divided against ourselves, they rejoice to see their work done for them. The Duke of Argyle distinctly recognized this feeling, not in himself but in 403others. Roebuck openly avowed it in the House of Commons. The papers on all hands abused him for it. But, in fact, it was because he spoke the truth, which they were ashamed to have spoken so boldly and openly. I met at Yungfrau a young Irishman, friendly, who gave the same view of English feeling. Indeed, I have searched into it and am thoroughly satisfied that it is mainly and deeply the dread of our gigantic national development in the future, that has been coiled up as the main-spring under all the other reasons, excuses, and pretendings, and that has, consciously or unconsciously, moved the whole mind of England. Against this what will reasoning or exposition avail? Is there any explanation that will make England ready to stand second? Is there any way of stating our gigantic power that would lead her to rejoice in it? I do not propose to pull wool over their eyes, nor to play the sheep in any way. For I distinctly see the difficulty. I know it to be unremovable, and all that can be done is to appeal to the higher feelings of the Christian part of England, that the elect few, in both countries, may hold fast the golden cords of love till God in His own way shall have settled the future.”

As late as August 27 we find him still in doubt as to what he will do in England; at that date he writes:

“When you read this, therefore, I shall probably be in London. I cannot yet decide anything about my course in England. From a distance I do not see any occasion or necessity for my squandering time there in speaking....”

On his way back to England he passed through Brussels; while there he paid his respects to the United States minister, Mr. Sandford. We give his experience in his own words:

“In drawing near to England I went to Brussels, and at a dinner by our American minister there, found him very much wavering as to our final success. I expressed such sentiments, and expressed them so firmly, as to lead him to wish that I should see King Leopold of Belgium, who was considered the wisest sovereign in Europe, and to whom Queen Victoria and others were accustomed to refer many questions for judgment or arbitration.

“For the first and only time in my life I prepared myself for the ordeal. But oh! consider it, ye that dwell at home, ye that sit at ease among flowers and all pleasant things—consider 404my sufferings in a fashionable hat, a white cravat, and a pair of white gloves! Yes, it was even so! I reluctated, but Sandford plead; and as it was more for his sake than my own that I consented to the interview at all, and also because the king was very influential with all the sovereigns of Europe, and especially with Victoria, and was pleased with attentions from Americans, I took to myself a hat, cravat, and gloves, and in an open barouche with two white horses, and Mr. Simmonds sitting by the side of the driver, large as life, and most happy to be the courier of a party called on in all the capitals by American ministers and consuls, and now going actually to see the king! Happy, happy Simmonds! The crowd stared; the people gave way right and left; the royal guard at the Governor’s House opened; we dismounted just at eleven (hat, cravat, gloves, and all). A golden-laced official received us at the lower door and jabbered French in our faces, which we answered by making for the stairs beyond him. At the top two officers, much dressed, bowed and seemed to be expecting us, showing us toward a pair of folding-doors which, opening into the ante-room, revealed to us an aide-de-camp in waiting, who took my card, walked softly to the next door, communed with some one within, returned, and said that in a moment the king would receive us.

“In a moment the door opened, a servant beckoned us, and we entered. A tall man in full military uniform, blue, with eleven orders, crosses, etc., on his left breast, with hair black (not his own), of a face quite reverend, long, thin, somewhat corrugated, came towards us graciously and paternally, bowed gently, and began a conversation of our travels, of Europe, of America a little. Well, it was my duty, of course, always to address him as ‘Sire,’ but I generally managed to call him ‘Sir’ with a hasty correction to ‘Sire.’

“After some conversation, in which he plainly intimated to me that he would rejoice in bringing us to terms and peace again, all the while intimating that the South could not be overcome, and that it would be very wise for us to make a compromise, and that he would be entirely willing to render service in that direction, I said to him: ‘Your majesty’—I got it out once or twice right—‘if there were any ruling sovereign in Europe to whom more than to another we should be glad to refer this question, it would be to the king of Belgium, a judge among nations 405and adviser among kings; but we do not propose to refer it to any one. We are going to fight it out ourselves; the strongest will win in our conflict, and so it must be settled.’

“Turning from that, he asked me what I thought of sending Maximilian to Mexico—for at that time he had not been sent to be the emperor of this new nation the Latins had established there; and, without suitable diplomacy, I said to him: ‘Your majesty, any man that wants to sit upon a throne in Mexico, I would advise to try Vesuvius first; if he can sit there for a while, then he might go and try it in Mexico.’

“This very soon brought our conversation to a close. He bowed, we bowed. He stepped back a step, we two, and, repeating the operation, we were soon at the door and out of it.”

The next day finds Mr. Beecher at London. But a short time before, and while in Paris, an event occurred that had a marked effect upon his subsequent course in England and the results which he achieved. The news came to him of the fall of Vicksburg and the repulse of Lee at Gettysburg:

“Such a revulsion of feeling as I experienced myself, and such a revulsion and intoning as all patriotic Americans experienced (for all Americans were not patriotic; very largely they were commercial cowards), from those tidings, one can scarcely imagine who was not there to see. At this time I was staying in Paris at the Grand Hotel. It was on a radiant Sunday, as I wended my way from the hotel to the church, that the news came of the surrender of Vicksburg. No words can tell the buoyancy, the awful sense of gladness that I had. I went into the house of God and sat down in the pew of our minister to France, Mr. Dayton. By my side sat his daughter. In a pause in the service I turned to Miss Dayton and asked, ‘Have you heard the news?’ ‘No,’ said she, looking earnestly at me. ‘Vicksburg has fallen!’ ‘Is it true?’ ‘Yes, be sure.’ She answered me not a word, but turning to her companion, another young lady, she whispered it to her, and both sat still as statues. The hymn was given out, the music sounded, and she began to sing; but no sooner had she opened her lips than, in a flood of tears, she buried her face in her hands and wept for gladness and triumph. It overwhelmed her, and it overwhelmed me too. And before the sun went down, yea, before the sun was at noon, the other tidings came of the victory at Gettysburg; and then my cup ran 406over. No man can tell how victoriously I walked. In the ample court of the Grand Hotel there usually gathered a very large company of Southern men, to whom my name was not savory; and day after day, as I went out, they were wont to collect in one corner, and with sneers and undisguised attempts at insult they met me as I came in and went out, even sending contemptible messages to me by the servants (which I never received, being intercepted at the office, although I heard of them afterwards). But on that day when I heard that Lee had been driven out of Pennsylvania and that Vicksburg had surrendered to Grant, I put on my best coat, walked down-stairs and out into that court to see how it fared with my brethren of the South; but, alas! they were not there, not one of them. They, too, had heard something!

“The effect which these tidings produced throughout Great Britain was immense. Before this no avowed friend of the North could go through the Exchange in Liverpool without being looked at and watched, largely as one would look at a bear escaped from a menagerie. My friend Charles Duncan had scarcely been able to transact business without being insulted at every step; when the good news came he went down into the Exchange to look into the faces of these men that had been so insulting, but there was not a man in the whole Exchange who had not been on our side from the very beginning, and who had not always believed in us, in our cause, and in our final victory! How wonderful are the workings of Providence!

“On returning to England representations were made to me which compelled me to consent to a series of public speeches. Our friends said: ‘We have sacrificed ourselves in your behalf, and have been counted as the offscouring, because we had championed the cause of the North; and now if you go home without making a recognition of our efforts we will be overwhelmed.’ Aside from other considerations, I found that a movement was on foot to induce Parliament to declare for the Southern Confederacy. This they were very willing to do, but did not dare to without the approval of the unvoting English, who held great power. Steps had been taken by friends of the Southern cause to have orators go through the manufacturing districts for the purpose of enlisting the sympathies of the laboring classes.

“By projecting a series of meetings on the other side it was 407hoped that this mischievous course might be baffled and forestalled. At first there was thought of but a single speech, and that at Manchester. So soon as it was known that there was to be such a meeting applications were made from Glasgow, from Edinburgh, from Liverpool and London, for like meetings in these places.”

Facing the Mob in Manchester—Glasgow—Edinburgh—Desperate Attempts to break Mr. Beecher down at Liverpool—Victory in London.

“After spending some days in the Lake district I went to Manchester to meet the engagement there for October 9th. Great excitement existed; the streets were placarded with vast posters, printed in blood-red, appealing to the passions and even to the spirit of violence on the part of the people. Threats resounded on every side. Both there and at Liverpool afterwards it was declared that I should never come out of the audience alive.

“I was met at the station by John Estcourt and young Watts, whose father was Sir Something Watts and had the largest business house in Central England. When they approached me I saw that there was something amiss, and before I had proceeded twenty steps they let the cat out of the bag: ‘Of course you know there is a great deal of excitement here’—at the same time pointing to placards printed in red letters, with which the streets were flooded, denouncing the Northern cause and all its advocates. I always feel happy when I hear of a storm, and I looked at them and said: ‘Well, are you going to back down?’ ‘No,’ said they, ‘but we didn’t know how you would feel.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘you’ll find out how I’m going to feel. I’m going to be heard. I won’t leave England until I have been heard.’

“The Free Trade Hall, I was informed, held from five to six thousand. It was the purpose of our adversaries to break down my first speech in England there, and prevent my being heard thereafter. All the great papers of London and of the kingdom were represented. The tumult defies description. No American audience, under any amount of excitement that I have ever known, could be compared for one moment with the condition of the audience at Manchester; and that was equalled, and surpassed even, by the one subsequently at Liverpool. If one can imagine a shipmaster giving orders to a mutinous crew in the midst 409of a tropical thunder-storm, he will have some faint idea of the task that was on my hands.

“Although in every speech I was obliged to rehearse substantially the same general facts in regard to the questions at issue in America, yet each speech had a field peculiar to itself. In Manchester I discussed the effect of slavery upon manufacturing interests of the world, and gave a history of the external political movement for fifty years past, so far as it was necessary to illustrate the fact that the American war was only an overt and warlike form of a contest between liberty and slavery that had been going on politically for over half a century.”

After Mr. Beecher was introduced, and before he had fairly entered upon his speech, the mob began to show its teeth, and in a few seconds there was one unparalleled scene of riot and confusion. Mr. Beecher took the measure of his audience, about one-fourth of whom only were against him, but they made up in noise and tumult what they lacked in numbers. They had been systematically bunched about the house, so as to make their interruptions the more effective. He had come with his speech carefully prepared in manuscript, but when the interruptions began he tossed the paper to one side, and, stepping forward, with head erect, said: “My friends, we will have a whole night’s session, but we will be heard.” It was like attempting to preach a sermon through a trumpet in a howling gale; but the press was well represented, and, bending forward, he said to the reporters: “Gentlemen, be kind enough to take down what I say. It will be in sections, but I will have it connected by and by.” The uproar continued, and all sorts of insulting questions were hurled at the speaker. The latter, however, had made up his mind to be heard, and he was. He would wait until the noise had somewhat subsided, then, arresting the attention of the audience by some witticism, he would take advantage of the lull to give them some telling sentences. Finally, after about an hour of speaking by fits and starts, the audience became manageable. The English admire pluck, and they had an excellent example of the article before them, and finally could not fail to show their appreciation. His cool, determined appearance as he said, “I have many times encountered similar opposition, and afterwards been heard; I shall be heard to-night,” produced a marked effect, and in a short time thereafter the vast assemblage was brought in perfect silence 410and into full sympathy with the speaker. They listened during the remaining hour, and were convinced; the next morning every paper in England printed the entire speech.

Just as the speaker was drawing to a close, occurred a stirring incident that strongly emphasized the effect of this speech. The chairman, taking advantage of a slight pause, touched Mr. Beecher on the shoulder and whispered a few words to him. The latter retired sufficiently to give his place to the chairman, who, raising a paper which he held, said in a distinct voice: “I hold in my hand a telegram just received from London, stating that her Majesty has to-night caused the ‘broad arrow’ to be placed on the rams in Mr. Laird’s yard at Birkenhead.” This meant the stoppage of the ships which were being built for Confederate cruisers. The effect was startling. The whole audience rose to its feet. Men cheered and waved their hats, while women waved their handkerchiefs and wept.

At the conclusion of his address the feeling of the audience, which a short time previous had been a howling mob, can be best portrayed by the following incident: A big, burly Englishman who was sitting in the gallery, seeing that it would be impossible to reach Mr. Beecher to shake hands with him, cried, “Shake my umbrella,” at the same time reaching it down to him. Mr. Beecher complied with the request, and as he did so the enthusiastic Englishman cried, “By Jocks! nobody sha’n’t touch that umbrella again!” Hundreds of others, more fortunate, crowded in to shake the speaker’s hand.

Of course it will be impossible, within our space, to give the speeches entire, whilst an attempt at analysis would be like presenting a bony skeleton bared of its flesh, omitting all that gave them life and strength. But a few of the more striking passages from each speech may not be uninteresting:^[7]

“I have not come to England to be surprised that those men whose cause cannot bear the light are afraid of free speech. I have had practice of more than twenty-five years, in the presence of tumultuous assemblies, opposing those very men whose representatives now attempt to forestall free speech. Little by little, I doubt not, I shall be permitted to speak to-night. Little by 411little I have been permitted in my own country to speak, until at last the day has come there, when nothing but the utterance of speech for freedom is popular. You have been pleased to speak of me as one connected with the great cause of civil and religious liberty. I covet no higher honor than to have my name joined to the list of that great company of noble Englishmen from whom we derived our doctrines of liberty. For although there is some opposition to what are here called American ideas, what are these American ideas? They are simply English ideas bearing fruit in America. We bring back American sheaves, but the seed corn we got in England; and if, on a larger sphere and under circumstances of unobstruction, we have reared mightier harvests, every sheaf contains the grain that has made Old England rich for a hundred years....

“Allusion has been made by one of the gentlemen to words or deeds of mine that might be supposed to be offensive to Englishmen. I am sure that in the midst of this mighty struggle at home, which has taxed every power and energy of our people, I have never stopped to measure and to think whether my words, spoken in truth and with fidelity to duty, would be liked in this shape or in that shape, by one or another person, either in England or America. I have had one simple, honest purpose, which I have pursued ever since I have been in public life, and that was, with all the strength that God has given to me, to maintain the cause of the poor and of the weak in my own country. And if, in the height and heat of conflict, some words have been over-sharp and some positions have been taken heedlessly, are you the men to call one to account? What if some exquisite dancing-master, standing on the edge of a battle where Richard Cœur de Lion swung his axe, criticised him by saying that ‘his gestures and postures violated the proprieties of polite life’? When dandies fight they think how they look, but when men fight they think only of deeds. But I am not here either on trial or on defence. Here I am before you, willing to tell you what I think about England or any person in it. The same agencies which have been at work to misrepresent good men in our country to you, have been at work to misrepresent to us good men here; and when I say to my friends in America that I have attended such a meeting as this, received such an address, and beheld such enthusiasm, it will be a renewed pledge of amity. 412I have never ceased to feel that war, or even unkind feelings between two such great nations, would be one of the most unpardonable and atrocious offences that the world ever beheld, and I have regarded everything, therefore, which needlessly led to those feelings out of which war comes, as being in itself wicked. The same blood is in us. We hold the same substantial doctrines. We have the same mission amongst the nations of the earth. Never were mother and daughter set forth to do so queenly a thing in the kingdom of God’s glory as England and America. Do you ask why we are so sensitive, and why have we hewn England with our tongue as we have? I will tell you why. There is no man who can offend you so deeply as the one you love most.... Now (whether we interpreted it aright or not is not the question), when we thought England was seeking opportunity to go with the South against us of the North, it hurt us as no other nation’s conduct could hurt us on the face of the globe; and if we spoke some words of intemperate heat, we spoke them in the mortification of disappointed affection. It has been supposed that I have aforetime urged or threatened war with England. Never! This I have said—and this I repeat now and here—that the cause of constitutional government, and of universal liberty as associated with it, in our country, was so dear, so sacred that, rather than betray it, we would give the last child we had; that we would not relinquish this conflict though other States rose and entered into a league with the South; and that, if it were necessary, we would maintain this great doctrine of representative government in America against the armed world—against England and France.... We ask no help and no hindrance. We do not ask for material aid. We shall be grateful for moral sympathy; but if you cannot give us moral sympathy we shall still endeavor to do without it. All that we say is, Let France keep away, let England keep hands off; if we cannot manage this rebellion by ourselves, then let it not be managed at all. We do not allow ourselves to doubt the issue of this conflict. It is only a question of time. For such inestimable principles as are at stake—of self-government, of representative government, of any government at all, of free institutions rejected because they inevitably will bring liberty to slaves unless subverted, of national honor, and fidelity to solemn national trusts—for all these war is waged; and if by war these shall be 413secured, not one drop of blood will be wasted, not one life squandered. The suffering will have purchased a glorious future of inconceivable peace and happiness! Nor do we deem the result doubtful. The population is in the North and West. The wealth is there. The popular intelligence of the country is there. There only is there an educated common people. The right doctrines of civil government are with the North. It will not be long before one thing more will be with the North—victory. Men on this side are impatient at the long delay; but if we can bear it, can’t you? You are quite at ease; we are not. You are not materially affected in any such degree as many parts of our own land are. But if the day shall come in one year, in two years, or in ten years hence, when the old stars and stripes shall float over every State of America; if the day shall come when that which was the accursed cause of this dire and atrocious war—slavery—shall be done away; if the day shall have come when through all the Gulf States there shall be liberty of speech, as there never has been; when there shall be liberty of the press, as there never has been; when men shall have common schools to send their children to, which they never have had in the South; in short, if the day shall come when the simple ordinances, the fruition and privileges, of civil liberty, shall prevail in every part of the United States—it will be worth all the dreadful blood and tears and woe. You are impatient; and yet God dwelleth in eternity, and has an infinite leisure to roll forward the affairs of men, not to suit the hot impatience of those who are but children of a day and cannot wait or linger long, but according to the infinite circle on which He measures time and events!...

“The institutions of America were shaped by the North; but the policy of her government, for half a hundred years, by the South. All the aggression and filibustering, all the threats to England and tauntings of Europe, all the bluster of war which our government has assumed, have been under the inspiration and under the almost monarchical sway of the Southern oligarchy. And now, since Britain has in the past been snubbed by the Southerners, and threatened by the Southerners, and domineered over by the Southerners—yet now Great Britain has thrown her arms of love around the Southerners, and turns from the Northerners. [A voice, ‘No.’] She don’t? I have only to say that she has been caught in very suspicious circumstances. 414I speak as I have, perhaps as much as anything else, to bring out from you this expression; to let you know, what we know, that all the hostility felt in my country towards Great Britain has been sudden, and from supposing that you sided with the South and sought the breaking up of our country; and I want you to say to me, and through me to my countrymen, that those irritations against the North, and those likings for the South, that have been expressed in your papers, are not the feelings of the great mass of your nation. [Great cheering, the audience rising.] Those cheers already sound in my ears as the coming acclamations of friendly nations; those waving handkerchiefs are the white banners that symbolize peace for all countries. Join with us, then, Britons. From you we learnt the doctrine of what a man was worth; from you we learnt to detest all oppressions; from you we learnt that it was the noblest thing a man could do TO DIE FOR A RIGHT PRINCIPLE. And now, when we are set in that very course, and are giving our best blood for these most sacred principles, let the world understand that the common people of Great Britain support us....”

The attempt to “break Beecher down at his first speech” signally failed. He had beaten the mob. He had made himself heard, and the full reports of his speech were scattered throughout the entire kingdom. Many crude misconceptions were corrected, not a few of his opponents were converted, while many others were forced to admit that they had received some new ideas respecting the North and the United States government. On the 13th he spoke in Glasgow, where the blockade-runners were being built, and where the laboring-classes were in some sense bribed by their occupation in the shipyards. Here were discussed the effects of slavery upon the welfare of the working-classes the world over, showing the condition of work or labor necessitated by any profitable system of slavery, demonstrating that it brought labor into contempt, affixing to it the badge of degradation; that a struggle to extend servile labor across the American continent interests every free workingman on the globe, and that the Southern cause was the natural enemy of free labor and the free laborer all the world over.

A strong Southern sentiment existed here, and the same attempt was made as in Manchester to break the speaker down. The City Hall was crowded to its utmost limits with friends and 415opponents. The opposition here was neither so determined nor prolonged as at Manchester. His success there had encouraged him while it discouraged them.

His opening sentences established a kindly bond between the hearers, so devotedly attached to their own country, and the speaker. Their kindly interest once aroused, it was not difficult to gain and keep their sympathy throughout the speech. The unruly element was soon put down, but little disturbance occurring after the first half-hour.

“No one who has been born and reared in Scotland can know the feeling with which, for the first time, such a one as I have visited this land, classic in song and in history. I have been reared in a country whose history is brief. So vast is it that one might travel night and day for all the week, and yet scarcely touch historic ground. Its history is yet to be written; it is yet to be acted. But I come to this land, which, though small, is as full of memories as the heaven is of stars, and almost as bright. There is not the most insignificant piece of water that does not make my heart thrill with some story of heroism or some remembered poem; for not only has Scotland had the good fortune to have had men that knew how to make heroic history, but she has reared those bards who have known how to sing her histories.... I come to Scotland, almost as a pilgrim would go to Jerusalem, to see those scenes whose stories had stirred my imagination from my earliest youth; and I can pay no higher compliment than to say that, having seen some part of Scotland, I am satisfied; and permit me to say that if, when you know me, you are a thousandth part as satisfied with me as I am with you, we shall get along very well together. And yet, although I am not of a yielding mood nor easily daunted, I have some embarrassment in speaking to you to-night. I know very well that there are not a few things which prevent my doing good work among you. I differ greatly from many of you. I respect, although I will not adopt, your opinions. I can only ask as much from you for myself. I am aware that a personal prejudice has been diligently excited against me.... It is not a pleasant avenue to a speech for a man to walk through himself. But since every pains is taken to misrepresent me, let me once for all deal with that matter. In my own land I have been the subject of misrepresentation and abuse so long that when I did not receive it I felt 416as though something was wanting in the atmosphere. I have been the object of misrepresentation at home simply and only because I have been arrayed, ever since I had a voice to speak and a heart to feel—body and soul I have been arrayed, without regard to consequences, and to my own reputation or my own ease, against that which I consider the damning sin of my country and the shame of human nature—slavery. I thought I had a right, when I came to Great Britain, to expect a different reception; but I found that the insidious correspondence of men in America had poisoned the British mind, and that representations had been made that I had indulged in the most offensive language and had threatened all sorts of things against Great Britain. Now, allow me to say that, having examined that interesting literature, so far as I have seen it published in British newspapers, I here declare that ninety-nine out of one hundred parts of those things that I am charged with saying I never said and never thought—they are falsehoods wholly and in particular. Allow me next to say that I have been accustomed freely and at all times, at home, to speak what I thought to be sober truth both of blame and of praise of Great Britain, and if you do not want to hear a man express his honest sentiments fearlessly, then I do not want to speak to you. If I never spared my own country, if I never spared the American Church, nor the government, nor my own party, nor my personal friends, did you expect I would spare you?... I have heard the voice of my Master, saying, ‘If any man come unto Me and hate not father, and mother, and brother, and sister, yea, and his own life also, he is not worthy of Me.’ When, therefore, the cause of truth and justice is put in the scale against my own country, I would disown country for the sake of truth; and when the cause of truth and justice is put in the scale against Great Britain, I would disown her rather than betray what I understood to be the truth. We are bound to establish liberty, regulated Christian liberty, as the law of the American Continent. This is our destiny, this is that towards which the education of the rising generation has been more and more assiduously directed as the peculiar glory of America—to destroy slavery and root it out of our land, and to establish in its place a discreet, intelligent, constitutional, regulated Christian liberty.... I call your attention to a few propositions, then, in reference to slavery as it exists in the extreme Southern States. And, first, the system 417of slavery requires ignorance in the slave, and not alone intellectual but moral and social ignorance. Anybody who is a slaveholder will find that there are reasons which will compel him to keep slaves in ignorance, if he is going to keep them at all. Not because intelligence is more difficult to govern; for with an intelligent people government is easier.... The slave would not be less easily governed if he were educated. If the slaveholder taught him to read and write, if he made him to know what he ought to know as one of God’s dear children, the South would not be so much endangered by insurrection as she is now. There is nothing so terrible as explosive ignorance. Men without an idea, striking blindly and passionately, are the men to be feared. Even if the slaves were educated they would be better slaves. What is the reason, then, that slaves must be kept in ignorance? The real reason is one of expense. In order to make slave labor profitable you must reduce the cost of the slave; for the difference between the profit and the loss turns upon the halfpenny per pound. If the price of slaves goes up and cotton goes down a shade in price, in ordinary times, the planters lose. The rule is, therefore, to reduce the cost of the man; and the slave, to be profitable, must be simply a working creature. What does a man cost that is a slave? Just a little meal and a little pork, a small measure of the coarsest cloth and leather—that is all he costs. Because that is all he needs—the lowest fare and the scantiest clothing. He is a man with two hands, and two feet, and a belly. That is all there is of a profitable slave. But every new development within him which religion shall make—the sense of fatherhood, the wish for a home, the desire to rear his children well, the wish to honor and comfort his wife, every taste, every sentiment, every aspiration—will demand some external thing to satisfy it. His being augments. He demands more time.... Profitable slaveholding requires only so much intelligence as will work well, and only so much religion as will make men patient under suffering and abuse. More than that—more conscience, more ambition, more divine ideas of human nature, of men’s dignity, of household virtue, of Christian refinement—only makes the slave too costly in his tastes. Not only does the degradation of the slave pass over to his work, but it affects all labor, even when performed by free white men. Throughout the South there is the most marked public disesteem 418of honest homely industry.... But even in the most favored portions of the South manual labor is but barely redeemed from the taint of being a slave’s business, and nowhere is it honored as it is in the great and free North. Whereas, in the richer and more influential portions of the South, labor is so degraded that men are ashamed of it. It is a badge of dishonor. The poor and shiftless whites, unable to own slaves, unwilling to work themselves, live in a precarious and wretched manner but a little removed from barbarism, relying upon the chase for much of their subsistence, and affording a melancholy spectacle of the condition into which the reflex influence of slavery throws the neighboring poor whites. Having turned their own industry over to slaves, and established the province and duties of a gentleman to consist of indolence and politics, it is not strange that they hold the people of the North in great contempt. The North is a vast hive of universal industry. Idleness there is as disreputable as is labor in the South. The child’s earliest lesson is faithful industry. The boy works, the man works. Everywhere through all the North men earn their own living by their own industry and ingenuity. They scorn to be dependent. They revolt at the dishonor of living upon the unrequited labor of others. Honest labor is that highway along which the whole body of the Northern people travel towards wealth and usefulness. From Northern looms the South is clothed, from their anvils come all Southern implements of labor, from their shops all modern ware, from their lasts Southern shoes. The North is growing rich by its own industry. No wonder, then, that Southerners have been wont to deride the free workmen of the North. Governor Hammond only gave expression to the universal contempt of Southern slaveholders for work and workmen when he called the Northern laborer the ‘mudsill of society,’ and stigmatized the artisan as the ‘greasy mechanic.’ The North and South alike live by work: the North by their own work, the South by that of their slaves! Which is the more honorable? I have a right to demand of the workmen of Glasgow that they should refuse their sympathy to the South, and should give their hearty sympathy to those who are, like themselves, seeking to make work honorable and to give to the workman his true place in society. Disguise it as they will, distract your attention from it as they may, it cannot be concealed that the American question is the 419workingman’s question all over the world! The slavemaster’s doctrine is that capital should own labor—that the employers should own the employed. This is Southern doctrine and Southern practice. Northern doctrine and Northern practice is that the laborer should be free, intelligent, clothed with full citizen’s rights, with a share of the political duties and honors. The North has from the beginning crowned labor with honor. Nowhere else on earth is it so honorable.”

On the following evening, October 14, he spoke in Edinburgh. The crowd, that packed the hall and completely blocked the entrances, was so vast that it very nearly deprived the meeting of both chairman and speaker. With great difficulty they managed to struggle through and finally reached the platform. Edinburgh being a centre of refinement and learning, Mr. Beecher aimed to give some idea of the philosophy of slavery, showing, how, out of separate colonies and States intensely jealous of their individual sovereignty, there grew up and was finally established a nation; and how, in that nation of united States, the distinct and antagonistic systems were developed and strove for the guidance of the national policy, which struggle at length passed and the North gained the control. Thereupon the South abandoned the Union, simply and solely because the government was in future to be administered by men who would give their whole influence to freedom. Comparatively speaking, but little opposition was encountered at this meeting. At the outset some disturbance was attempted, but the temper of the audience was opposed to the unruly ones and they were soon quieted. The speech produced a marked impression, the resolution and vote of thanks being carried with “loud and prolonged applause.” We give a few extracts from it:

“During the last fifteen years I believe you cannot find a voice, printed or uttered, in the cotton States of the South, which deplored slavery. All believed in and praised it, and found authority for it in God’s Word. Politicians admired it, merchants appreciated it, the whole South sang pæans to the newfound truth that man was born to be owned by man. This change of doctrine made it certain that the South would be annoyed and irritated by a Constitution which, with all its faults, still carried the God-given principle of human rights, which were not to be taken by man except in punishment for crime. That 420Constitution, and the policy which went with it at first, began to gnaw at, and irritate, and fret the South when they had adopted slavery as a doctrine. How could they live in peace under a Constitution that all the time declared the manhood of men and the dignity of freedom? It became necessary that they should do one of two things, either give up slavery or appropriate the government to themselves, and in some way or other drain out of the Constitution this venom of liberty and infuse a policy more in harmony with Southern ideas. They took the latter course. They contrived to possess themselves of the government; and for the last fifty years the policy of the country has been Southern. Was a tariff wanted? It was made a Southern tariff. Was a tariff oppressive? The Southerners overthrew it. Was a tariff wanted again? The Southern policy declared it to be necessary, and it was passed. Was more territory wanted? The South must have its way. Was any man to obtain a place? If the South opposed it he had no chance whatever. For fifty years most of the men who became judges, who sat in the presidential chair and in the courts, had to base their opinions on slavery or on Southern views. All the filibustering, all the intimidations of foreign powers, all the so-called snubbing of European powers, happened during the period in which the policy of the country was controlled by the South. May I be permitted to look on it as a mark of victorious Christianity that England now loves her worst enemy, and is sitting with arms of sympathy round her neck? The man who was an Abolitionist when I was twenty-one years of age might bid farewell to any hopes of political advancement; and the merchant who held these opinions was soon robbed of customers. As far as I remember, there was nothing in the world that so ruined a man—not crime itself was so fatal to a man’s standing in the country—as to be known to hold abolition sentiments. The churches sought to keep the question of slavery out; so did the schools and colleges; so did synods and conventions. But still the cause of abolition progressed; and still, as is always the case with everything that is right, though the men who held those sentiments were scoffed at, though such men as Garrison were dragged through the streets with halters round their necks, yet the more it was spoken of and canvassed the more the cause prospered, because it was true. The insanity at last abated; for 421the command came from on High saying to the evil spirit concerning the North: ‘I command thee to come out of her.’ Then the nation wallowed on the ground and foamed at the mouth; but the unclean spirit passed out, and she became clean. The more some people wanted to keep down this subject and keep out the air, the more God forced the subject on their minds. When Missouri knocked at the door there were those who opposed its admission as a slave State, but by Southern management and intimidation Henry Clay persuaded the North to a compromise. Now, when there is no difference in principle, but only conflicting interests, a compromise is honorable and right; but when antagonistic principles are in question I believe compromises to be bargains with the devil, who is never cheated.... We do not want to quarrel; we do not want animosity between Great Britain and America. No man has spoken of Great Britain words of praise and blame with more honest heart than I have. That man is not your friend who dares not speak of your faults to your face. The man that is your friend, tells you when he thinks you are wrong; and whether I am right or wrong, I assert that in giving moral sympathy largely to the South, and, above all, in allowing the infamous traffic of your ports with the rebels, thus strengthening the hands of the slaveholders—and that without public rebuke—you have done wrong. I have said this because, dear as your country is to us, precious as were the legacies given to us of learning and religion, and proud as we have been for years past to think of our ancestry and common relationship to you, yet so much dearer to us than kindred is the cause of God that, if Great Britain sets herself against us, we shall not hesitate one moment on her account, but shall fulfil our mission! ... I have a closing word to speak. It is our duty in America, by every means in our power, to avoid all cause of irritation with every foreign nation, and with the English nation most especially. On your side it is your duty to avoid all irritating interference, and all speech that tends to irritate. Brothers should be brothers all the world over, and you are of our blood, and we are of your lineage. May that day be far distant when Great Britain and America shall turn their backs on each other and seek an alliance with other nations! The day is coming when the foundations of the earth will be lifted out of their places; and there are two nations that 422ought to be found shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand for the sake of Christianity and universal liberty, and these nations are Great Britain and America.”

The effect of these three speeches was being very widely felt. It looked at first as though the backbone of opposition had been broken.

This pleasant impression was soon dispelled. The mob spirit was not dead; it was only resting and gaining breath for a final and more desperate effort.

The next speech was to be in Liverpool on the 16th, at the great Philharmonic Hall.

Liverpool was the headquarters of the Southern sympathizers. A great many Southern men were there.

The feeling was very strong that if Mr. Beecher should succeed there he would carry the day. A determined and desperate effort was to be made, at any cost, to prevent the delivery of the speech.

The streets were placarded with abusive and scurrilous placards, often posted over the notices of the meeting, couched in the most inflammatory language, urging that “Englishmen see that he gets the welcome he deserves.” On the morning of the 16th the leading papers came out with violent editorials against Mr. Beecher, full of falsehoods and misquotations from his speeches. Every art was resorted to to work the passion of the mob up to the point of violence.

We quote a brief extract from the Liverpool Courier of that date:

“The visit of Mr. Henry Ward Beecher to Liverpool to-night is not likely to do the Federal cause much service in this neighborhood. His views on slavery are too violent and unreasonable to meet with much favor from thoughtful people; and even those who earnestly desire the freedom of the Southern slaves would not consent to adopt the extreme, sanguinary principles enunciated by Mr. Beecher.... But, apart from his abolition doctrines, Mr. Beecher, unless he has been greatly misrepresented, has displayed the most intense hatred of Great Britain, and has vilified the British people in a disgraceful manner. He was most violent in his denunciations of England during the never-to-be-forgotten Trent affair, and if his views had been adopted the two great Anglo-Saxon peoples would have been plunged into 423war. When he said, ‘The best blood of England must flow for the outrage England had perpetrated upon America,’ he used language unbecoming a man, still more a professing preacher of the Gospel. Yet the person who could thus insult the British nation has now the audacity to come amongst us to lecture us on American politics. Such conduct evidences unbounded impudence and little discretion, and can only be explained by the assumption that he is the accredited emissary of the Federal government.”

It was openly declared that if he should dare to address the meeting he would never leave the hall alive—a threat believed to have been sincerely made, with the fullest intention of fulfilment. The friends of Mr. Beecher were greatly alarmed, many advising him not to attend the meeting.

He was fully conscious of the risk that he ran, and knew that to be present was to carry his life in his hand. During the whole day he was under the shadow of a black cloud. He was plunged into the depths of despondency. He was going to the meeting, but would he leave it alive? Could he make himself heard? Must he fail now that he was on the very verge of success? These and similarly anxious thoughts tormented him throughout the day. No light illumined the darkness of his soul until, having left the hotel, he was on his way to the hall; then, he says, suddenly a great light burst in upon him, and, night though it was, it seemed as if the whole heavens blazed with light like the noonday. Fears and anxious doubts disappeared like mists before the morning sun. A great peace settled down upon him, and as he entered the hall he was filled with the certainty of succeeding.

It was well known that the mob was armed; it was not so well known that a small but determined band of young men, occupying a commanding position to the right of the platform, were also armed, determined, if any dangerous outbreak occurred, to protect Mr. Beecher at all hazards. Mr. Beecher himself was in ignorance of the fact until some days later. Happily nothing more serious than noise was developed, the cool and determined appearance of the speaker and the earnest demonstration by the majority present seeming to discourage a resort to violence.

The speech was devoted to a discussion of the relation of slavery to commerce, showing that, in the long run, it was as 424hostile both to commerce and manufactures the world over as it was to free interests in human society; that a slave nation must be a poor customer, buying the poorest and fewest goods, and the least profitable to the producers; that it was the interest of every manufacturing country to promote freedom, intelligence, and wealth amongst all nations; that the attempt to cover the fairest portion of the globe with a slave population that buys nothing, and a degraded white population that buys next to nothing, should array against it every political economist and every thoughtful and far-seeing manufacturer, as tending to strike at the vital wants of commerce, which was not cotton but rich customers.

It would be impossible for tongue or pen adequately to describe the scenes at the meeting. The great hall was packed to the crushing point. The mob was out in force, with lungs in good working order and a disposition to use them to the best advantage.

Manchester and Glasgow were love-feasts in comparison.

We give an attempt at description from one of the Liverpool papers:

“For several days before the meeting it was understood that efforts would be made to create a disturbance.

“For some moments before the time fixed for the commencement of the proceedings, cat-calls, groans, cheers, hisses, etc., were freely indulged in, and it was evident that a strong force of the pro-Southern (or at least of the anti-Beecher) party had congregated in front of the gallery and at the lower end of the body of the hall. The début of the Rev. Mr. Beecher was, judging from the frequently manifested impatience of the audience, awaited with intense interest. Several occupants of seats in the upper gallery loudly insisted upon somebody bringing him out; and when the reverend gentleman did step on the platform, the enthusiasm of his friends and the indignation of his opponents were almost indescribable. Cheer rolled after cheer with deafening effect, and, in the brief pauses between each hurrah, hisses fell upon the ear with a sound like that of a falling torrent. The uproar was maintained so long that the chairman, Mr. Robertson, determined not to await the abatement of the storm, but to try to subdue it by a few judicious words. He was only partly successful until he appealed to the audience as Englishmen to stand up for fair play and not to withhold justice from a stranger.

425“Mr. Beecher’s introduction surprised though it did not disconcert that gentleman. He was evidently prepared for some opposition; but he could hardly have expected that his appearance at the front of the platform, would rouse one portion of the audience to a high state of enthusiasm, and cause the other portion to approach almost a state of frenzy. For some time it was doubtful whether the celebrated Abolitionist would be allowed to speak; but those who sat near the reverend gentleman, and observed his firmly-compressed lips and imperturbable demeanor, saw at once that it would require something more than noise and spasmodic hisses to cause Mr. Beecher to lose heart. He stood calmly at the edge of the platform, a representation of ‘patience smiling at grief,’ and a simile of sincerity, battling tacitly but successfully with opposition. One of the two must sooner or later give way, and no one who scrutinized Mr. Beecher’s features could imagine that he would be the first to become tired. At last there was a lull; clergymen and ladies ceased to wave their umbrellas and handkerchiefs, the torrent of hisses became less perceptible, and the chairman made another appeal to the meeting for fair play to Mr. Beecher. His assurance that an opportunity would be offered, after Mr. Beecher had concluded his address, to persons who wished to ask the reverend gentleman questions, was not very favorably received, and a series of disturbances ensued. Cries of ‘Turn him out!’ were heard in various parts of the hall, and efforts were made to eject some members of the unruly party. When the scuffling had partly subsided, the chairman expressed his determination to preserve order by calling in, if necessary, the aid of the police. This announcement produced something like order, and Mr. Beecher took up the advantage and commenced his address. The interruptions were incessant, while a scene prevailed the equal of which has seldom been witnessed in Liverpool. ‘Three cheers for Jeff. Davis!’ was a proposal which once more met with a hearty response from a portion of the audience; and as the admirers of the Confederate President were loath to cease their expressions of approval, Mr. Beecher composedly sat down on the low parapet of the platform and awaited a calm, at the same time apologizing to the reporters for causing them to be so long detained. At one time, about a score of persons were speaking in various parts of the hall, and Mr. Beecher, as a last resource, said that if the meeting would 426not hear him he would address the reporters. From the gallery were suspended placards on which the words, ‘Who is Henry Ward Beecher?’ were conspicuous; and, taken all in all, the scene was one of complete disorder. Mr. Beecher repeatedly declared that it was not new to him; but he admitted that his struggle for an hour and a half against the prevailing disorder had caused his voice to fail. So far, indeed, had his voice suffered that he was compelled, in concluding, to declare that he could not answer any questions unless perfect order prevailed. He did reply, in comparative peace, to one or two written interrogatories; but, the disturbance being renewed, Mr. Beecher sat down.”

A few quotations from this speech will not only give an idea of the line of Mr. Beecher’s argument, but, by retaining the interruptions as indicated by the reports in the next day’s papers, will also to some extent show the conditions under which the speech was delivered.

“For more than twenty-five years I have been made perfectly familiar with popular assemblies in all parts of my country except the extreme South. There has not for the whole of that time been a single day of my life when it would have been safe for me to go south of Mason and Dixon’s line in my own country, and all for one reason: my solemn, earnest, persistent testimony against that which I consider to be the most atrocious thing under the sun—the system of American slavery in a great, free republic. [Cheers.] I have passed through that early period when right of free speech was denied to me. Again and again I have attempted to address audiences that, for no other crime than that of free speech, visited me with all manner of contumelious epithets; and now since I have been in England, although I have met with greater kindness and courtesy on the part of most than I deserved, yet, on the other hand, I perceive that the Southern influence prevails to some extent in England. [Applause and uproar.] It is my old acquaintance; I understand it perfectly [laughter], and I have always held it to be an unfailing truth that where a man had a cause that would bear examination he was perfectly willing to have it spoken about. [Applause.] And when in Manchester I saw those huge placards, ‘Who is Henry Ward Beecher?’ [laughter, cries of ‘Quite right,’ and applause], and when in Liverpool I was told that there were those 427blood-red placards, purporting to say what Henry Ward Beecher had said, and calling upon Englishmen to suppress free speech—I tell you what I thought; I thought simply this: ‘I am glad of it.’ [Laughter.] Why? Because if they had felt perfectly secure that you are the minions of the South and the slaves of slavery, they would have been perfectly still. [Applause and uproar.] ... And, therefore, when I saw so much nervous apprehension that if I were permitted to speak [hisses and applause]—when I found they were afraid to have me speak [hisses, laughter, and ‘No, no’]; when I found that they considered my speaking damaging to their cause [applause]; when I found that they appealed from facts and reasonings to mob law [applause and uproar], I said: No man need tell me what the heart and secret counsel of these men are. They tremble and are afraid. [Applause, laughter, hisses, ‘No, no,’ and a voice: ‘New York mob.’] Now, personally, it is a matter of very little consequence to me whether I speak here to-night or not. [Laughter and cheers.] But one thing is very certain—if you do permit me to speak here to-night you will hear very plain talking. [Applause and hisses.] You will not find a man [interruption]—you will not find me to be a man that dared to speak about Great Britain 3,000 miles off, and then is afraid to speak to Great Britain when he stands on her shores. [Immense applause and hisses.] And if I do not mistake the tone and the temper of Englishmen, they had rather have a man who opposes them in a manly way [applause from all parts of the hall] than a sneak that agrees with them in an unmanly way. [Applause and ‘Bravo.’] Now, if I can carry you with me by sound convictions, I shall be immensely glad [applause]; but if I cannot carry you with me by facts and sound arguments, I do not wish you to go with me at all; and all that I ask is simply FAIR PLAY. [Applause, and a voice: ‘You shall have it, too.’] Those of you who are kind enough to wish to favor my speaking—and you will observe that my voice is slightly husky, from having spoken almost every night in succession for some time past—those who wish to hear me will do me the kindness simply to sit still and to keep still; and I and my friends the Secessionists will make all the noise. It is just as important to have customers educated, intelligent, moral, and rich out of Liverpool as it is in Liverpool. [Applause.] They are able to buy; they want variety, they want the very best; and those are 428the customers you want. That nation is the best customer that is freest, because freedom works prosperity, industry, and wealth. Great Britain, then, aside from moral considerations, has a direct commercial and pecuniary interest in the liberty, civilization, and wealth of every people and every nation on the globe. [Loud applause.] You have also an interest in this, because you are a moral and a religious people. [‘Oh! oh!’ laughter, and applause.] You desire it from the highest motives; and godliness is profitable in all things, having the promise of the life that is, as well as of that which is to come; but if there were no hereafter, and if man had no progress in this life, and if there were no question of civilization at all, it would be worth your while to protect civilization and liberty, merely as a commercial speculation. To evangelize has more than a moral and religious import—it comes back to temporal relations. Wherever a nation that is crushed, cramped, degraded under despotism is struggling to be free, you, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Paisley, all have an interest that that nation should be free. When depressed and backward people demand that they may have a chance to rise—Hungary, Italy, Poland—it is a duty for humanity’s sake, it is a duty for the highest moral motives, to sympathize with them; but beside all these there is a material and interested reason why you should sympathize with them. Pounds and pence join with conscience and with honor in this design. Now, Great Britain’s chief want is—what? They have said that your chief want is cotton. I deny it. Your chief want is consumers. [Applause and hisses.] ... Now, there is in this a great and sound principle of political economy. [‘Yah! yah!’ from the passage outside the hall, and loud laughter.] If the South should be rendered independent—[at this juncture mingled cheering and hisses became immense; half the audience rose to their feet, waving hats and handkerchiefs, and in every part of the hall there was the greatest commotion and uproar.] You have had your turn now; now let me have mine again. [Loud applause and laughter.] It is a little inconvenient to talk against the wind; but, after all, if you will just keep good-natured—I am not going to lose my temper; will you watch yours? [Applause.] Besides all that, it rests me, and gives me a chance, you know, to get my breath. [Applause and hisses.] And I think that the bark of those men is worse than their bite. They do not mean any harm—they don’t know 429any better. [Loud laughter, applause, hisses, and continued uproar.] What will be the result if this present struggle shall eventuate in the separation of America, and making the South [loud applause, hisses, hooting, and cries of ‘Bravo!’] a slave territory exclusively [cries of ‘No, no,’ and laughter], and the North a free territory—what will be the first result? You will lay the foundation for carrying the slave population clear through to the Pacific Ocean. There is not a man that has been a leader of the South any time within these twenty years that has not had this for a plan. Never have they for a moment given up the plan of spreading the American institutions, as they call them, straight through towards the West, until the slave who has washed his feet in the Atlantic shall be carried to wash them in the Pacific. [Cries of ‘Question!’ and uproar.] There! I have got that statement out, and you cannot put it back. [Laughter and applause.] ... Now, here are twelve millions of people, and only one-third of them are customers that can afford to buy the kind of goods that you bring to market. [Interruption and uproar.] My friends, I saw a man once, who was a little late at a railway station, chase an express-train. He did not catch it. [Laughter.] If you are going to stop this meeting you have got to stop it before I speak; for after I have got the things out you may chase as long as you please—you will not catch them. [Laughter and interruption.] But there is luck in leisure; I’m going to take it easy. [Laughter.] Two-thirds of the population of the Southern States to-day are non-purchasers of English goods. [A voice, ‘No, they are not,’ ‘No, no,’ and uproar.] And if by sympathy or help you establish a slave empire, you sagacious Britons [‘Oh! oh!’ and hooting]—if you like it better, then, I will leave the adjective out [laughter, hear, and applause]—you will be busy in favoring the establishment of an empire from ocean to ocean that should have fewest customers and the largest non-buying population. [Applause; ‘No, no.’] ... It was the South that obliged the North to put the tariff on. [Applause and uproar.] Just as soon as we begin to have peace again and can get our national debt into a proper shape, as you have got yours [laughter], the same cause that worked before will begin to work again; and there is nothing more certain in the future than that the American is bound to join with Great Britain in the world-wide doctrine of free-trade. [Applause and interruption.] 430Here, then, so far as this argument is concerned, I rest my case, saying that it seems to me that in an argument addressed to a commercial people it was perfectly fair to represent that their commercial and manufacturing interests tallied with their moral sentiments; and as by birth, by blood, by history, by moral feeling, and by everything, Great Britain is connected with the liberty of the world, God has joined interest and conscience, head and heart, so that you ought to be in favor of liberty everywhere. [Great applause.] There! I have got quite a speech out already, if I do not get any more. [Hisses and applause.] ...

“It is said that the North is fighting for Union, and not for emancipation. The North is fighting for Union, because we never shall forget the testimony of our enemies. They have gone off declaring that the Union in the hands of the North was fatal to slavery. [Loud applause.] There is testimony in court for you. [A voice, ‘See that,’ and laughter.] We are fighting for the Union, because we believe that preamble which explains the very reason for which the Union was constituted. I will read it. ‘We’—not the States—‘We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect NATION’ [uproar]—I don’t wonder you don’t want to hear it [laughter]—‘in order to form a more perfect NATION, establish justice, assure domestic tranquillity [uproar], provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of LIBERTY [‘oh! oh!’] to ourselves and our posterity, ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.’ [A voice: ‘How many States?’] It is for the sake of that justice, that common welfare, and that liberty for which the National Union was established, that we fight for the Union. [Interruption.] Because the South believed that the Union was against slavery, they left it. [Renewed interruption.] Gentlemen, I have travelled in the West ten or twelve hours at a time in the mud knee-deep. It was hard toiling my way, but I always got through my journey. I feel to-night as though I were travelling over a very muddy road; but I think I shall get through. [Cheers.] ... In the first place, I am ashamed to confess that such was the thoughtlessness [interruption], such was the stupor of the North [renewed interruption]—you will get a word at a time; to-morrow will let folks see what it is you don’t want to hear—that for a period of twenty-five years she went to sleep, and permitted herself to be drugged 431and poisoned with the Southern prejudice against black men. [Applause and uproar.] ... When I was twelve years old my father hired Charles Smith, a man as black as lampblack, to work on his farm. I slept with him in the same room. [‘Oh! oh!’] Ah! that don’t suit you. [Uproar.] Now, you see, the South comes out. [Loud laughter.] I ate with him at the same table; I sang with him out of the same hymn-book [‘Good’]; I cried when he prayed over me at night; and if I had serious impressions of religion early in life, they were due to the fidelity and example of that poor humble farm-laborer, black Charles Smith. [Tremendous uproar and cheers.] ... There is another fact that I wish to allude to—not for the sake of reproach or blame, but by way of claiming your more lenient consideration—and that is, that slavery was entailed upon us by your action. [Hear, hear.] Against the earnest protests of the colonists the then government of Great Britain—I will concede not knowing what were the mischiefs—ignorantly, but in point of fact, forced slave-traffic on the unwilling colonists. [Great uproar, in the midst of which one individual was lifted up and carried out of the room amidst cheers and hisses.] ... We do not agree with the recent doctrine of neutrality as a question of law. But it is past, and we are not disposed to raise that question. We accept it now as a fact, and we say that the utterance of Lord Russell at Blairgowrie [applause, hisses, and a voice, ‘What about Lord Brougham?’], together with the declaration of the government in stopping war-steamers here [great uproar and applause], has gone far towards quieting every fear and removing every apprehension from our minds. [Uproar and shouts of applause.] And now in the future it is the work of every good man and patriot not to create divisions, but to do the things that will make for peace. [‘Oh! oh!’ and laughter.] On our part it shall be done. [Applause and hisses, and ‘No, no.’] On your part it ought to be done; and when, in any of the convulsions that come upon the world, Great Britain finds herself struggling single-handed against the gigantic powers that spread oppression and darkness [applause, hisses, and uproar], there ought to be such cordiality that she can turn and say to her first-born and most illustrious child, ‘Come!’ [Hear, hear, applause, tremendous cheers, and uproar.] I will not say that England cannot again, as hitherto, single-handed manage any power [applause and uproar]; but I will say that 432England and America together for religion and liberty [a voice, ‘Soap, soap,’ uproar, and great applause] are a match for the world. [Applause; a voice, ‘They don’t want any more soft soap.’]”

Thus in the wildest confusion, little by little, a few sentences at a time, the speech was delivered. For nearly three hours the fight was kept up, until at last the speech was done. Although the mob was not quieted—it did not come there for that purpose—yet the speech was delivered, and, what was more to the point, was printed verbatim in the morning’s papers. The mob wholly failed to accomplish their object. It did not break down Mr. Beecher.

Four days later the concluding speech of the series was to be delivered at Exeter Hall, London. The great metropolis was the centre of political thought and influence. It was of great importance that the London speech should be a success, and to that end that the speaker should be in good condition himself.

But the constant strain upon his voice in his efforts to be heard in the first three speeches, culminating in the prolonged struggle at Liverpool, where his strength had been taxed to the uttermost, had at last gone beyond even his powers of endurance. The day before the London speech his voice failed him; by night he could not speak above a whisper. Voiceless, he was helpless. When he first realized the truth he was for a moment overwhelmed. To fail in London was, in very large measure, to lose the ground so hardly gained.

“I felt all day Monday that I was coming to London to speak to a public audience, but my voice was gone; and I felt as though about to be made a derision to my enemies, to stand up before a multitude and be unable to say a word. It would have been a mortification to any one’s natural pride. I asked God to restore me my voice, as a child would ask its father to grant it a favor. But I hoped that God would grant me His grace to enable me, if it was necessary for the cause that I should be put to open shame, to stand up as a fool before the audience. I said: ‘Lord, Thou knowest this. Let it be as Thou wilt.’”

Rest being of the first importance, he retired early, and, having wrapped his throat in wet bandages, dismissed all further thought of the morrow and slept.

In the morning waking refreshed, the first thought that came 433to him was, “Can I speak?” For a while he lay silent, fearing the attempt. First he tried a low whisper, then louder, finally spoke out. His voice had returned, not in its old strength, yet strong enough to use. Now his exaltation was as great as twelve hours before had been his depression.

The night came, and with it increased strength, fully sufficient for the work before him.

In this speech slavery was discussed in its moral relations. Of the meeting we quote briefly from the published account of an eye-witness:

“In the five great speeches which Mr. Beecher has made in England and Scotland on the American question, before vast audiences, he has taken care to observe a system of selection which has brought before the country all the great salient points of the American war. He has not repeated himself, but met the Confederate sympathizers here, upon every field which they had chosen for their own advantage. But the grand climax of all his efforts was that which was made at Exeter Hall last night, before a crowd as great as ever gathered into that immense hall, and which, despite the persistent efforts of the opposition to destroy the meeting and its effect, made a mark upon English opinion which must prove of the utmost importance.

“Mr. Beecher’s strokes in other cities of the kingdom having invariably drawn blood from the hides of the Confederate sympathizers here, it was plain that they had determined to meet with yells and uproar what they could not meet with argument. That an organized opposition was contemplated was not concealed. During all yesterday, posters were scattered through the length and breadth of the city, making all kinds of charges of a personal character against him, abounding in fictitious and distorted quotations from discourses and lectures delivered by him in old times. It had been considered of prime importance to the Confederate cause here that Lord Russell’s assertion at Blairgowrie, that the moral sympathies of the English people were adverse to the Southern cause, should be disproved; and it was hoped, through personal assaults upon Mr. Beecher, to injure the effect of the meeting, and then claim it in as the verdict of London in favor of the Southern Confederacy.

“At an early hour the hall was crowded to overflowing, and there was evidence, too, that they were orderly men and women, 434who, whether sympathizing with the North or not, had come to hear a fair discussion of the question which concerns all, and were determined to secure fair play. The crowd outside in the Strand and Exeter Street was enormous, and consisted chiefly of the opposition. One of the committee came in smilingly, and said: ‘Our shilling admission-fee has filtered the crowd. The Southern sympathizer is always a man who looks hard at a shilling before he parts with it, and then don’t part with it.’ Yet it was known that in two or three sections of the house there were parties who meant mischief.

“When Beecher arose there were five minutes of the most tremendous cheering that I have ever witnessed. Wave after wave, as of a tumultuous sea of sound, came thundering up from the gallery at one end to the organ at the other, in the midst of which stood Mr. Beecher, calm as a rock in the midst of the surges. A hiss was then begun, but at his first word it sank back into the diaphragms of those who uttered or meant to utter it. The first glance and the self-possessed manner of the man told plainly that he had something to say in Exeter Hall that night, and that he meant to be heard.

“Mr. Beecher’s voice was scarcely as sonorous and clear as it usually is, and all recognized that this was natural after the many speeches in immense halls which he had given during the week. ‘I expect to be hoarse,’ he said, ‘and I am willing to be hoarse if I can in any way assist to bring the mother and daughter heart to heart and hand to hand together.’ This sentiment was received with great applause; and Beecher’s hoarseness was thus impressed to the service of his cause. But he so economized his voice that every word was distinctly heard by the vast assembly. And I assure you that every word was freighted; in the day when men are called to give an account for every idle word spoken, Mr. Beecher will not be confronted by any one uttered last night at Exeter Hall. At one time, when there was an interval of a few moments arising from the effort of the hisses to triumph over the cheers, Mr. Beecher, with a quiet smile, said: ‘Friends, I thank you for this interruption; it gives me a chance to rest.’ The hisses thereupon died away, and had no resurrection during the evening. It was evident, indeed, that the speaker, who knows a thing or two about audiences, felt that the meeting was his and that no interruption would succeed. 435But many of his friends had serious apprehensions. One of the editors of the Star, himself a distinguished speaker, and thoroughly acquainted with English audiences, who sat near to me, whispered in my ear: ‘There are a great many here who do not cheer; there is a strong chance of a row yet; but the meeting is just in such a condition that its result will depend upon the power and equanimity of the speaker.’ ‘Then,’ I replied, ‘you needn’t fear.’ If Mr. Beecher had heard our brief whispers he could not have more distinctly appreciated the remark of the editor. At that moment, although he had been interesting all along, he suddenly stepped one side from the desk upon which his notes lay, and his face gleamed like a sword leaping from a scabbard. No more hisses, no more cheers, now for half an hour; the audience is magnetized, breathless; when the first pause came, a Sir Somebody, sitting behind me, said, ‘Why, he looked at first like a heavy man, but he’s got wings’; whilst a reporter near our feet whispered audibly to a brother writer, ‘Oh! but he can put things!’ Mr. Beecher forgot all things but his subject; his tongue burned with living coals; his arm pointed like a prophet’s rod. The shams of our enemies in England; their talk of peace when they mean every kind of bloodshed except that which is for justice—‘the aspect of a lamb with the voice of a dragon,’ as St. John saw it; their cant about emancipation being not a principle with Mr. Lincoln, but only an expedient, as if that would make liberty any less a prize to the slave and humanity if they got it—all these collapsed palpably before the masses then gathered, and all the fine points of Roebuck and Lindsay became toads under the touch of his flame-tipped spear.

“‘This cannot go on,’ whispered a clergyman near; ‘these strokes draw too much blood; the victim is writhing in pain now.’

“Again did Mr. Beecher level his lance; it was at those who were making capital out of what they call ‘American sympathy with the oppressor of Poland.’ Nothing could exceed the drollery with which, almost blushing, he presented the loving and jealous maiden who, when her suitor is not attentive enough, gets up a flirtation with some other man. ‘America flirts with Russia, but has her eye on England.’ Now, the presence of warships from Russia at New York has been the leading card of the Confederates here in their game to win popular sympathy for the 436South; for our friends among the English people are also the friends of the Poles. It was plain that the opposition in the meeting did not mean to let this matter pass without trying to get some capital. Consequently, when Mr. Beecher said, ‘But it is said it is very unworthy that America should be flirting with the oppressor of Poland,’ there were violent shouts, ‘Yes, yes,’ ‘Certainly it is,’ etc. Mr. Beecher waited until the cries had entirely subsided, and a little time had been allowed for friend and foe to speculate as to his reply; then, leaning a little forward, he put on an indescribably simple expression, and said mildly: ‘I think so, too. And now you know exactly how we felt when you flirted with Mason at the lord-mayor’s banquet.’ I cannot attempt to describe the effect of these words on the throng. The people arose with a shout that began to be applause, but became a shout of laughter. The hit was so perfect and felicitous that roars of hearty laughter told that that topic was summed up for ever. Three loud groans given for the late lord-mayor—his place is now filled with a much better man—ended that scene, and the drama proceeded.

“In the heart of Mr. Beecher’s oration was given a denunciation of slavery more powerful than I have ever heard from his lips. He scored and scourged it until it seemed to stand before us a hideous monster, bloated with human blood and writhing under his goads.

“Mr. Beecher, having sustained himself throughout better than I had ever known him to do before—and I am pretty familiar with his grand successes in our own country—having carried the meeting entirely and evoked the warmest expressions of good-will to America, sat down, leaving the audience hungry and shouting ‘Go on, go on!’”

London was captured; the speech was discussed in every parlor and in every club. It was the topic of the day. Farewell meetings, veritable love-feasts, were held in London, Manchester, and Liverpool on the 23d, 24th, and 30th of October, and then Mr. Beecher sailed for home.

That these speeches, delivered just at this time, in connection with the events at home, produced a marked effect cannot be doubted. They certainly cleared up many gross misconceptions that filled the English mind, and gave the English people a clearer insight into the real purpose of our government and the 437true object of the South. This seems to have been the judgment of contemporaneous opinion. A prominent English paper said:

“Before he left England he had thoroughly enlisted the sympathies of the people with the cause of the North; and he had no small share in averting a collision, which at one period of the Civil War threatened ominously, between this country and the United States.”

On his return to Brooklyn he was called to address two monster meetings on his English experiences, one in Brooklyn in aid of the War Fund Committee, and one in New York in aid of the United States Sanitary Commission. In his introductory speech at the former, Dr. R. S. Storrs thus eloquently summarizes Mr. Beecher’s work abroad:

“We are here as American citizens all, to welcome one who has done to our country on foreign shores a signal service! The rapid and private trip which he undertook, simply for the purposes of rest and recreation, was transformed, not so much by his own device or desire or will as by the persistent urgency of Englishmen, into a real international embassy of peace and good-will. And by consent of all who know, of all the interpreters, the advocates, the champions of our great national cause in England—of whom there have been not a few able and eloquent—no one has labored more faithfully, zealously, and effectively than he....

“We may gratefully recognize the kindness and the wisdom of that preceding preparation of both body and mind which fitted him for this work. The rest and leisure of those weeks upon the Continent prepared him not only to face the rough seas that have delayed his return, but to meet and master the more tempestuous savagery of the Liverpool mob. The Alpine peaks to whose summit he climbed contributed, no doubt, to lift him afterwards to the climax of his eloquence at London and at Manchester. And so it has come to pass that to him it is owing, as much, perhaps, as to any other one man on either hemisphere, that the mind of the great middle class in England—which is the mind that in the last analysis moulds and governs the government of Great Britain—is at least now partially informed concerning the principles and the history of our struggle; that the warships framed by Confederate malice and commercial cupidity to harass our commerce, break our blockade, or desolate our cities, 438are not to be left to step out to sea through any loose interpretation of the law, but are to be kept chained to the docks and held there by the strong arm of the government, and that stars of promise are shining in the east, where lately the thunderbolts of war seemed to gather.”

At this same meeting Mr. Beecher himself gave an outline of the state of public opinion when he reached England, and some estimate of his own work in changing this public opinion:

“I desire this evening to speak upon that which you all have come to hear—namely, my impressions and experiences in respect to the condition of things in Great Britain, as they relate to this struggle and this country.

“There are many reasons why an American would have presumed it easy to understand British feeling and British policy. There was a similarity of institutions in England and America and a sameness of radical principles; but that very similarity, since it begets, through different institutions and different vehicles, different policies, is liable to deceive us. If I had judged of the condition of England from the impressions produced upon me by my first four weeks’ tarry there in the summer, I should have judged very wrongly. You are aware that the original expectation of our people was almost universal that in Great Britain we should find a sympathizer. One thing we counted sure, and that was that, if all the other nations stood aloof, there was one which would stand by us in the hour of our peril, and that one was Great Britain. And the sharpness of our retaliatory complaints was acuminated by that very disappointment of a very confident conviction. We never asked for help. We never asked that she should lend us anything, or stretch out so much as the little finger of her right hand. We did ask simply a generous confidence and a generous moral sympathy, and that was all. I found, in the first place, on going there, that every man I met was a Southern man—not literally born in the South, but this is the designation they have themselves made. They are Southerners and Northerners even more than we are here. I found that on the railways, on the boats, in the hotels, and wherever there was a travelling public, there was a public that sympathized with the South and adverse to the North.

“The nobility as a class are also against us, though there are some very noble exceptions.

439“In Parliament, if a vote were taken to-day according to the private thoughts, sympathies, and wishes among its members, I suppose they would vote five to one against the North and in favor of the South. It is believed, too, by those well informed, that at least a portion of the government have been entirely willing to go into a rupture with the North, and that but for the unflinching restraints they would have done so long ago. But it is the impression throughout the realm that the sovereign of Great Britain has been from the first our judicious but our steadfast friend. It is believed, and so represented to me, that her never-rightly-estimated and lamented consort was our fast friend, and that among the last acts of his life were those which erased from documents presented to him sentences that would have inflamed the growing anger. And if you ask me what is the great underlying influence that has been at work upon the upper class of England, I answer thus:

“1. Commercial interest and rivalry therein.

“2. Class-power and the fear of contagion from American ideas.

“3. (I know not how I shall say it so that it shall be the least offensive to our friends on the other side, but neither they nor you have come to the bottom of the conduct of Great Britain until you have touched that delicate and real foundation cause.) We are too large and strong a nation.

“With this state of facts you will ask how it is that the English people have been restrained? How is it that they have not gone into overt belligerency? That is the very question that I propose to answer, and in the statement that the English heart is on our side. The nobility is against us; the government is divided and a part is against us. I think I may say that while the brains that represent progress in Great Britain are in our favor, yet the conservative intelligence of Great Britain is against us, and that all there is on the surface of society, representing its dignities, its power and intelligence, is anti-American. And the question I propose to you is, How, with the papers, magazines, and universities, how with their titled estates opposed to us, that they have been restrained from manifesting this in open hostility? It is because there is a great underlying influence that restrains them—it is the influence of that under-life, and to a very great extent of the non-voting English, which has produced this effect, 440It is a thing I could not understand at first, and which it is very difficult for us to understand; for wherever in our country there is a majority of the votes there is sure to be a direction of affairs. But it is not so in England. I learned that the men who could not vote, where they were united and determined, had the power to control the men who do vote. I hold in my hand a letter from Richard Cobden. He says: ‘You will carry back an intimate acquaintance with a state of feeling in this country among what, for a better name, I call the ruling class. Their sympathy is undoubtedly strongly for the South, with the instinctive satisfaction at the prospect of the disruption of the great Republic. It is natural enough. But do not forget that we have in this case, for the first time in our history, seen the masses of the British people taking sides for a foreign government against its rebellious citizens. In every other instance, whether in the case of the Poles, Italians, Hungarians and Corsicans, Greeks, or South Americans, the popular sympathy of this country has always leaped to the side of the insurgents the moment the rebellion has broken out. In the present case our masses have an instinctive feeling that their cause is bound up in the prosperity of the States—the United States. It is true that they have not a particle of power in the direct form of a vote, but, when millions in this country are led by the religious middle class, they can go and prevent the governing class from pursuing a policy hostile to their sympathies.’

“Into such an atmosphere and among such a people I went. And when, unsought, and indeed against my feelings if not against my judgment, I entered upon the labor of the past few weeks of my sojourn in England, I assumed the responsibility, I cannot say with trembling—for I am not accustomed much to tremble—but I assumed the responsibility with the gravest sense of what it was. I have felt the inspiration of nationality often, but I never before was placed between two such great peoples, where I saw them both in prospective, both in their present relations and in their future. I never before felt so much as I felt all the time, waking or dreaming, night or day, what it was to stand and plead for the unity of these two great nations, for the sake of struggling mankind; and it was at once an excitement to me and a support. But, after all, I did not know how my countrymen would regard my efforts. If you had disapproved I should have been sorry 441that you disapproved, but not sorry for what I had done. I did the best I knew how to do, every time, everywhere disinterestedly, for the love I bear to the cause and to the principles which underlie it. I did not hear from home whether my representations of policy, of fact, of history, and of the tendencies of things would accord with yours, or whether I should not be caught up in the whirl of conflicting parties, my reasonings traversed, and my arguments denied. When I landed in Boston I learned for the first time that my services had been accepted by my countrymen....

“That to a certain extent my speeches produced among the common people beneficial results there can be no doubt; but how far that extended, or whether they had influence upon the thinking classes, others could say better than I. They were certainly greatly aided by the fact that Lee was defeated at Gettysburg and driven back to Virginia, and that at the same time Grant received the surrender of Vicksburg. Those timely victories, together with other causes, held in check the manœuvres and diplomacy of crowned heads and made intervention less certain and more remote; and gave time for Grant’s success at Chattanooga, and his transfer to the Army of the Potomac, and in turn his promotion to general-in-chief of the operations in the field.

“I put no immoderate estimate on my services. I believe I did some good wherever I spoke. But it should be remembered that a single man, a stranger in the community, would be eaten up by vanity if he said or supposed, that he had done all the good that had been accomplished. There must have been preparation. He merely came to touch the train that had already been laid. When, in October, you go to the tree and give it a jar, and the fruit comes down all around you, it is not you that ripens it. A whole summer has been doing that. You merely brought down the fruit prepared. It was my happy fortune to be there to jar the tree. The fruit that fell was not of my ripening.”

A few brief extracts from three of the leading papers in New York, published at the time, are quoted as indications of the popular sentiment as to the value of his work:

“It is plain, from the whole tone of the British press, that Mr. Beecher has been instrumental in starting, or at least hastening, a 442complete revolution of the popular feeling of the kingdom in favor of our National cause. He is the man who ought to have been sent to England two years ago to enlighten and rouse the people. Had this been done he could have hardly failed of preventing a vast deal of that bitterness which has since, all the while, been fermenting between the two nations.”

“The Administration at Washington have sent abroad more than one man to represent the cause of the North and press it upon the minds of foreign courts and citizens; but here is a person who goes abroad without official prestige, on a mere private mission to recruit his health, and yet we doubt whether his four or five speeches in England have not done more for us, by their frank and manly exposition of our principles, our purpose, and our hopes, than all the other agencies employed.”

“Every loyal American, whatever his opinions respecting the past words and acts of Henry Ward Beecher, will thank him for his work across the water. It is no exaggeration to affirm that the five speeches he has delivered—in Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and London—each pursuing its own line of argument and appeal, have done more for our cause in England and Scotland than all that has been before said or written.”

Whatever may have been the causes, it is historical that the English government, which had been trembling upon the very verge of intervention, withdrew from this project and began to entertain much more peaceful and friendly feelings towards the United States—feelings that have grown stronger and deeper with each successive year.

Close of the War—Distrust of the Administration—Kindlier Feelings after Mr. Beecher’s Return from England—Growing Confidence—Intimacy with Secretary Stanton—Fort Sumter—Lee’s Surrender—Lincoln’s Death.

On his return home from England, Mr. Beecher found that there was a marked change in the feelings of the Administration towards him. It was the popular verdict, in which Washington concurred, that the series of speeches just delivered, in conjunction with the successes of our armies in the field, had switched the English government off from the track leading to intervention and probably war, and had started it in the direction of friendliness and peace. Before that time he had succeeded in creating in the minds of the President and his cabinet a feeling which, if not hostile, was at least not friendly. With many things that had occurred or failed to occur during 1861-2 and early in 1863 he had felt great impatience. He had had no sympathy with the feeling, that prevailed so generally during the first few months of the war, that it would be an affair of but a few months, that 75,000 men would be more than enough to end the rebellion. He felt that the proper policy was for the government to crush the rebellion by the power of an enormous army, and that it was but poor economy to send forward troops by driblets. Nor did he at all believe in the distinction that existed between the United States regulars and the State troops. He thought that they ought to be all United States troops. What he felt he was not slow to say. On June 10, 1861, he wrote to the President, urging the government to accept a regiment raised by Colonel Stockton:

“Ought not such a man as the one whom I send to you, Colonel T. B. W. Stockton, of Michigan, a West Point graduate, a colonel in the Mexican war, to have a chance in this great war, with a thousand men at his back?

“Do we not need men that have seen fire?

“I am exceedingly desirous, anxious even, that a large demonstration 444of power should be made, as a matter of economy, of humanity, and of expedition.

“Are we not in danger of being injured by a Northern misconstruction of State rights, which shall prevent government from taking troops where it pleases, without being obliged to come to the people through the machinery of State governments?

”It is the people’s war. The people must be allowed to have a fair chance for the exertion of their will.”

And later, when political expediency was permitted to play so prominent a part in the selection and action of our generals, his indignation was intense and outspoken. While he felt great admiration for President Lincoln and great confidence in him, still he felt that he was making serious mistakes. As we have seen, Mr. Beecher was then the editor-in-chief of the New York Independent, and through its editorials he sought to rouse both the President and public sentiment. Speaking of this time, he says:

“In 1862 the great delay, the want of any success, the masterly inactivity of our leading generals, roused my indignation, and I wrote a series of editorials addressed to the President” [to which we have referred and from which we have largely quoted in a previous chapter], “and as near as I can recollect they were in the nature of a mowing-machine—they cut at every revolution—and I was told one day that the President had received them and read them through with very serious countenance, and that his only criticism was: ‘Is thy servant a dog?’ They bore down on him very hard.”

Not unnaturally, neither the President nor his cabinet felt especially pleased at this. They looked upon it as a hostile attack, and did not regard him with any over-friendly feeling.

But in November, 1863, we find all this changed. The Administration now could see in past criticism, not personal hostility, but an anxious desire, through love of country, to prevent mistakes and secure the best course of action. A far more kindly and confidential relation was established, which continued through that Administration. When, in 1864, there was so much talk about compromise, Mr. Beecher went direct to the President and had a confidential talk with him, which he describes in a brief sketch (of Lincoln):

Mr. Beecher at the Close of the War.

“There was some talk early in 1864 of a sort of compromise 446with the South. Blair had told the President that he was satisfied, if he could be put in communication with some of the leading men of the South in some way or other, that some benefit would accrue. Lincoln had sent a delegation to meet Alexander Stephens, and that was all the North knew. We were all very much excited over that. The war lasted so long that I was afraid Lincoln would be so anxious for peace, and I was afraid he would accept something that would be of advantage to the South, so I went to Washington and called upon him. We were alone in his receiving-room. His hair was ‘every way for Sunday.’ It looked as though it was an abandoned stubble-field. He had on slippers, and his vest was what was called ‘going free.’ He looked wearied, and, when he sat down in a chair, looked as though every limb wanted to drop off his body. And I said to him: ‘Mr. Lincoln, I come to you to know whether the public interest will permit you to explain to me what this Southern commission means?’ Well, he listened very patiently, and looked up to the ceiling for a few moments, and said: ‘Well, I am almost of a mind to show you all the documents.’

“‘Well, Mr. Lincoln, I should like to see them if it is proper.’ He went to his little secretary, and came out and handed me a little card as long as my finger and an inch wide, and on that was written—

“‘There,’ he said, ‘is all there is of it. Now, Blair thinks something can be done, but I don’t, but I have no objection to have him try his hand. He has no authority whatever, but to go and see what he can do.’

“‘Well,’ said I, ‘you have lifted a great burden off my mind.’”

During the last year of the President’s life they became very intimate, and the respect and admiration which Mr. Beecher shared, in common with the general feeling of the North, deepened into a strong personal love. In one of his Friday night prayer-meetings, shortly after Mr. Lincoln’s death, he refers to their intimacy:

“I am sure no one more than I, can feel the personal affliction, outside of those that were immediately associated with 447President Lincoln. I need not say to you how my public relations have brought me, not only to the most constant study of his course and of his character, but into some personal relations with him that have given me more knowledge of him than otherwise I should have had. I was reading to-night, before I came here, the last letter that I received from him. It had reference to an interview which I had had with him on a particular subject. It is a precious letter to me. During the time that I was with him (it was between eleven and twelve o’clock at night, in Washington) his great kindness, his great simplicity, and his great frankness opened him to me, and I saw him more fully than ever before, as very wise, as shrewd as well as wise, as far-reaching and sagacious as well as shrewd, and, above all, as faithful to the great interests that were committed to him. That interview has come up to me over and over and over again. It seemed as though it was but yesterday. And when the tidings that he was gone came to me, I know not how I shall describe the sense that I had of a strange personal loss.”

During this period Mr. Beecher formed the acquaintance of Stanton, which speedily ripened into a very strong friendship, largely through an impulsive act of sympathy by Mr. Beecher:

“I came up Wall Street one day and met a friend, who said: ‘I have just come back from Washington. Stanton is breaking down; he won’t hold out much longer.’

“Well, it just struck me all into a heap. I walked into an office in Wall Street and said, ‘Will you allow me pen and ink?’ and wrote to him just what I had heard—that he was sick and broken down and desponding. I wrote that he need not despond, that the country was saved, and, if he did not do another thing, he had done enough. I sent the letter, and in the course of a few days I got back a letter, and if it had been a woman writing in answer to a proposal it could not have been more tender. And when I went to Washington he treated me with great tenderness, as if I had been his son.”

From this letter of Secretary Stanton, which is before us, we quote:

“How deeply your kind note has affected me is beyond my power to tell.... The approbation, confidence, and sympathy of any man was never more highly prized than yours is by me. Your friendly words are a cordial that strengthens me, and your 448kind sympathy will serve to dispel the gloom and despondency that, as you rightly judged, does sometimes, in moments of physical weariness, gather upon my brain and press heavily upon my heart. Let me tell you that often and often, in dark hours, you have come before me, and I have longed to hear your voice, feeling that above all other men you could cheer, strengthen, guide, and uphold me in this great battle, where, by God’s Providence, it has fallen upon me to hold a post and perform a duty beyond my own strength. But, being a stranger, I had no right to claim your confidence or ask for help, and so have been forced to struggle on patiently as I might from day to day, supported only by fervent faith in our sacred cause, and the consciousness that prayers were being offered up by good people for aid. Now, my dear sir, your voice has reached me, and your hand is stretched forth as to a friend, and henceforth I shall look to you and lean upon you with a sure and abiding trust. Already my heart feels renewed strength and is inspired with fresh hope. There are some points involved in, or developed by, this present contest, on which I wish to commune with you before long.”

Early in 1865, and shortly after the surrender of Charleston, in reply to a letter received from Mr. Beecher making some suggestions, the Secretary wrote:

“It will not be in my power to go to Charleston just now, but I would be glad to send you, and as many school-teachers as will go.... Your idea of raising the flag over a colored school and making our banner the banner of civilization is indeed a noble one, and heartily my feelings respond to the suggestion. Soon after the 4th of March I may be able to go to South Carolina and do what may be done in that direction.... We received this morning the news of the capture of Wilmington yesterday. Surely the end cannot be afar off. The battle of physical force is nearly won, and now we must fight for civilization, including therein legal protection to the rights of all, and universal education. What of strength, heart, and hope is left to me I am willing to spend with you in that cause. Please let me know if you will go to Charleston without waiting for me. The sooner you go the better.”

Shortly after this it was decided to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of Fort Sumter (April 14) by an imposing military and 449naval demonstration, and by raising again the old flag over its parapet, and the project of sending to Charleston a delegation headed by Mr. Beecher was abandoned.

As soon as the general plan of the Fort Sumter celebration had been decided upon, the President invited Mr. Beecher to be present and deliver the address.

On March 27, 1865, the following general order was issued:

The steamer Arago was sent by the government to New York to transport the invited guests to Charleston. As soon as the formal invitations to the guests of the government had been issued and accepted, Secretary Stanton telegraphed Mr. Beecher:

During this spring the Secretary was in constant telegraphic communication with Mr. Beecher, keeping him informed of each victory or successful move of our army as it occurred.

This led to a thrilling incident in Plymouth Church. During the month of March of this year it became very plain that the war was surely drawing to a close. Lee, hemmed in by Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, obviously could not hold out very much longer.

The whole country watched and waited with almost breathless interest as slowly but surely the end drew on, the intensity of feeling growing stronger as the end seemed nearer. It was in this condition of the public mind, and on Sunday, April 2, that, just after Mr. Beecher had finished his sermon and had given out a hymn, a telegram was handed up to him on the platform.

Catching the feeling in the air that something of importance had happened, every eye was turned to the platform and a silence like death fell upon the three thousand gathered there. Eagerly the telegram was opened, and as the flash of joy lit up Mr. Beecher’s face a thrill ran through the congregation, instantly hushed as he said:

“The congregation will turn to ‘America’ while I read the following telegram:

As he ceased speaking the great throng rose and, as one man, with streaming eyes joined in the triumphant anthem,

The organist drew the trumpet stops, and turned the full power of the great organ into the hymn, but it was drowned by the voices raised in solemn thanksgiving. Not a voice was silent, not an eye was dry. As the last notes of the hymn died out many a strong man dropped into his seat and sobbed with thankfulness. The beginning of the end had come.

On the 8th of April the Arago sailed from New York for Charleston. The day after she sailed came the surrender of Lee’s army.

Of course no word of the news was received aboard the Arago until she arrived off Charleston Harbor.

“It was when I was tossing upon the sea,” said Mr. Beecher, “off the harbor of Charleston, that we were spoken, and the tidings were communicated to us from another ship, ‘Lee has surrendered!’ And the wild outcry, the strange caprices and exultations of that moment, they never will forget who were present. We were far off from the scene of war; we saw no signs nor tokens; it was as if the heaven had imparted it to us; but oh! what gladness, what ecstasy there was in that news no man can know but those who have suffered as we had suffered.”

Of his speech at the raising of the flag we can only quote a few brief extracts:

“On this solemn and joyful day we again lift to the breeze our fathers’ flag, now again the banner of the United States, with 452the fervent prayer that God will crown it with honor, protect it from treason, and send it down to our children with all the blessings of civilization, liberty, and religion. Terrible in battle, may it be beneficent in peace! Happily no bird or beast of prey has been inscribed upon it. The stars that redeem the night from darkness, and the beams of red light that beautify the morning, have been united upon its folds. As long as the sun or the stars endure may it wave over a nation neither enslaved, nor enslaving. Once, and but once, has treason dishonored it. In that insane hour, when the guiltiest and bloodiest rebellion of time hurled its fires upon this fort, you, sir [turning to General Anderson], and a small heroic band, stood within these now crumbled walls, and did gallant and just battle for the honor and defence of the nation’s banner....

“After a vain resistance, with trembling hand and sad heart you withdrew the banner from its height, closed its wings, and bore it far away to sleep amid the tumults of rebellion and the thunder of battle....

“To-day you are returned again. The heavens over you are the same; the same shores are here; morning and evening come as they did. All else how changed! What grim batteries crowd the burdened shores! What scenes have filled this air and disturbed these waters! These shattered heaps of shapeless stone are all that is left of Fort Sumter. Desolation broods in yonder sad city; solemn retribution hath avenged our dishonored banner. You, who departed hence four years ago, leaving the air sultry with fanaticism, have come back with honor. The surging crowds that rolled up their frenzied shouts, as the flag came down, are dead, or scattered, or silent, and their habitations are desolate. Ruin sits in the cradle of treason. Rebellion has perished. But there flies the same flag that was insulted. With starry eyes it looks all over this bay for that banner that supplanted it, and sees it not. You that then, for the day, were humbled, are here again, to triumph once and for ever. In the storm of that assault this glorious ensign was often struck; but, memorable fact, not one of its stars was torn out by shot or shell. It was a prophecy. It said, ‘Not one State shall be struck from this nation by treason.’ The fulfilment is at hand. Lifted to the air to-day, it proclaims that, after four years of war, ‘not a State is blotted out!’...

453“Wherefore have we come hither, pilgrims from distant places? Are we come to exult that Northern hands are stronger than Southern? No; but to rejoice that the hands of those who defend a just and beneficent government are mightier than the hands that assaulted it! Do we exult over fallen cities? We exult that a nation has not fallen. We sorrow with the sorrowful. We sympathize with the desolate. We look upon this shattered fort and yonder dilapidated city, with sad eyes, grieved that men should have committed such treason, and glad that God hath set such a mark upon treason that all ages shall dread and abhor it.

“We exult, not for a passion gratified, but for a sentiment victorious; not for temper, but for conscience; not, as we devoutly believe, that our will is done, but that God’s will hath been done! We should be unworthy of that liberty entrusted to our care if, on such a day as this, we sullied our hearts by feelings of aimless vengeance; and equally unworthy if we did not devoutly thank Him who hath said, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord,’ that He hath set a mark upon arrogant Rebellion, ineffaceable while time lasts!...

“That long night is ended! And for this returning day we have come from afar, to rejoice and give thanks. No more war. No more accursed secession! No more slavery, that spawned them both!

“Let no man misread the meaning of this unfolding flag! It says, ‘Government hath returned hither.’ It proclaims, in the name of vindicated government, peace and protection to loyalty, humiliation and pains to traitors. This is the flag of sovereignty. The nation, not the States, is sovereign. Restored to authority, this flag commands, not supplicates.

“There may be pardon, but no concession. There may be amnesty and oblivion, but no honeyed compromises. The nation to-day has peace for the peaceful, and war for the turbulent. The only condition of submission, is, to submit! There is the Constitution, there are the laws, there is the government. They rise up like mountains of strength that shall not be moved. They are the conditions of peace.

”One nation, under one government, without slavery, has been ordained and shall stand. There can be peace on no other basis. On this basis reconstruction is easy, and needs neither 454architect nor engineer. Without this basis no engineer or architect shall ever reconstruct these rebellious States....

“I charge the whole guilt of this war upon the ambitious, educated, plotting political leaders of the South. They have shed this ocean of blood. They have desolated the South. They have poured poverty through all her towns and cities. They have bewildered the imagination of the people with phantasms, and led them to believe that they were fighting for their homes and liberty, whose homes were unthreatened, and whose liberty was in no jeopardy....

”But for the people misled, for the multitudes drafted and driven into this civil war, let not a trace of animosity remain. The moment their willing hand drops the musket and they return to their allegiance, then stretch out your own honest right hand to greet them. Recall to them the old days of kindness. Our hearts wait for their redemption. All the resources of a renovated nation shall be applied to rebuild their prosperity and smooth down the furrows of war.”

After the ceremonies of the 14th Mr. Beecher and his party spent two days in visiting the various historic points in the city and harbor of Charleston, then went to Hilton Head, where the steamer Sua Nada was placed at his disposal by the government.

From Hilton Head Mr. Beecher and his party went on an excursion visit to Beaufort. The day, which opened so bright and beautiful, was to close in the gloom which overshadowed the nation. The near points of interest about Beaufort had all been seen, and the party, full of the joyous brightness of the day, were sauntering back to the boat which was to take them to Hilton Head, when a telegram was handed to Senator Wilson that drove the smile from every lip. Lincoln had fallen, struck down by an assassin! Dazed and bewildered, for a few moments all stood silent; then Mr. Beecher exclaimed, “It’s time all good men were at home,” and in mournful silence they hastened back to Hilton Head. The Sua Nada was ordered to get under weigh at once. In sadness and gloom the party, that but a few days before had left New York with hearts filled with joy and thankfulness, now hastened back through dreary rain-storms—nature’s sympathetic mourning.

We can best describe that awful sorrow by quoting from Mr. Beecher’s sermon preached in memory of the martyr:

455“Never did two such orbs of experience meet in one hemisphere as the joy and the sorrow of the same week in this land. The joy was as sudden as if no man had expected it, and as entrancing as if it had fallen a sphere from heaven. It rose up over sobriety, and swept business from its moorings, and ran down through the land in irresistible course. Men embraced each other in brotherhood that were strangers in the flesh. They sang, or prayed, or, deeper yet, many could only think thanksgiving and weep gladness. That peace was sure; that government was firmer than ever; that the land was cleansed of plague; that the ages were opening to our footsteps, and we were to begin a march of blessings; that blood was stanched, and scowling enmities were sinking like storms beneath the horizon; that the dear fatherland, nothing lost, much gained, was to rise up in unexampled honor among the nations of the earth—these thoughts, and that undistinguishable throng of fancies, and hopes, and desires, and yearnings that filled the soul with tremblings like the heated air of midsummer days, all these kindled up such a surge of joy as no words may describe.

“In one hour joy lay without a pulse, without a gleam or breath. A sorrow came that swept through the land as huge storms sweep through the forest and field, rolling thunder along the sky, dishevelling the flowers, daunting every singer in thicket or forest, and pouring blackness and darkness across the land and up the mountains. Did ever so many hearts, in so brief a time, touch two such boundless feelings? It was the uttermost of joy: it was the uttermost of sorrow—noon and midnight, without a space between.

“The blow brought not a sharp pang. It was so terrible that at first it stunned sensibility. Citizens were like men awakened at midnight by an earthquake, and bewildered to find everything that they were accustomed to trust wavering and falling. The very earth was no longer solid. The first feeling was the least. Men waited to get straight to feel. They wandered in the streets as if groping after some impending dread, or undeveloped sorrow, or some one to tell them what ailed them. They met each other as if each would ask the other, ‘Am I awake, or do I dream?’ There was a piteous helplessness. Strong men bowed down and wept. Other and common griefs belonged to some one in chief: this belonged to all. It was each and every man’s. 456Every virtuous household in the land felt as if its first-born were gone. Men were bereaved, and walked for days as if a corpse lay unburied in their dwellings. There was nothing else to think of. They could speak of nothing but that; and yet of that they could speak only falteringly. All business was laid aside. Pleasure forgot to smile. The city for nearly a week ceased to roar. The great Leviathan lay down and was still. Even avarice stood still, and greed was strangely moved to generous sympathy and universal sorrow. Rear to his name monuments, found charitable institutions and write his name above their lintels; but no monument will ever equal the universal, spontaneous, and sublime sorrow that in a moment swept down lines and parties, and covered up animosities, and in an hour brought a divided people into unity of grief and indivisible fellowship of anguish.”

Reconstruction—Mr. Beecher favors speedy Readmission—Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Convention at Cleveland—The “Cleveland Letters” cause great Excitement.

With President Lincoln’s death the Rebellion died. A few fitful flames and a few smouldering coals here and there were all that was left of the great conflagration, but the Rebellion was broken and dead. In its death-struggles it struck one wicked, random blow, and left the victors mourning in the very hour of victory—never was so great a victory so sad and joyless.

But the nation soon roused itself and turned to the solution of those new problems which confronted it. Through four harsh and bitter years, years of suffering, this peace-loving nation had been trained to war. Energetic fighting men had been pushed forward, by the necessities of the times, to the front, and put in command of national affairs. A vast army, trained for fighting, was at hand. When suddenly the war was at an end, and he who with patient wisdom had stood at the helm, and guided the nation through such troubled seas, was stricken down. A new and untried man was, by virtue of his office, called to the head of the government. Armies were to be disbanded. The credit of the nation was to be sustained, and steps taken to meet the vast debt rolled up by the war. The problem was changed: instead of war was peace, disarmament, and reconstruction. Most serious of all was this question of reconstruction—what to do with the conquered States and conquered people. Having rebelled and led armies against the national government, the leaders had been guilty of high treason. What should be done to them? Should they be punished, and, if so, how? What should be done with the States? It had been determined that they should not depart from the Union. They were not in, and how should they be received back?

They had submitted, offered anew their loyalty to the government 458of the Nation, and asked to be taken back again. The passions of a four-years strife, and such a strife, were slow to subside; boiling blood cools but slowly. At first a strong feeling of resentment set in, and it was earnestly proposed to hang out of hand the leading rebels. Then they proposed to hang Jefferson Davis as a symbol of defeated treason, and so vicariously punish the South. In time even that feeling passed away. But on the question of reconstruction and readmission the feelings of the Republican party leaders ran high.

President Johnson, himself a loyal Southerner, was strongly in favor of readmitting the Southern States to a participation in the government (upon such terms as might be just), and receiving Senators and Congressmen from the readmitted States. To this plan Congress, which was overwhelmingly Republican, was bitterly opposed, and the result was the executive and legislative branches of the government divided one over against the other, waging a fierce and disgraceful fight—disgraceful alike to each. As in all other matters that affected the welfare of the government, Mr. Beecher was deeply interested in this, and lost no opportunity to express his views from the pulpit and the platform.

He was strongly opposed to any vindictive course, and when it was proposed to make an example of Jeff Davis he declared:

“The war is itself the most terrific warning that could be set up, and to attempt, by erecting against this lurid background the petty figure of a gallows with a man dangling at it, to heighten the effect, would be like lighting tapers when God’s lightnings are flashing across the heavens to add to the grandeur of the storm.”

On the 20th of February, 1866, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in answer to Wendell Phillips’s lecture entitled “The South Victorious,” given a short time previous, Mr. Beecher delivered a speech which he called “The North Victorious.” In this he took a pronounced stand on the question of reconstruction:

“Each day will develop the prosperity of the South moving upon the new basis, and each day will make it plainer and plainer to them that nationality is necessary for their prosperity. Old aspirations must die. The war passion must cease. It is a new South we are talking about. It has a new political economy. It has a new future. God has said by the side of the sepulchre, 459‘South, come forth!’ and the South has come, though bound hand and foot. Methinks I hear the Saviour say, ‘Loose her and let her go.’

“On the other hand, look for one moment at the effects of a prolonged exclusion of the Southern States. It is weaning the citizens of those States more and more from the national government. For five years they have not thought of Washington except to curse her. They have not felt the need of it. They have not felt any blood running through them that came from the national heart. It is proposed to make them live five years more out of the Union. Is that the way to make them love it? Is that the way to make them feel their need of the government?

“The utmost evil in admitting them that can result will be that we shall be obliged to take a longer time to do some things which now we mean to do by legislation. Many of the things which we seek to accomplish by laws we shall be obliged to accomplish by moral means. I have seen this anxiety to do everything by legislation, legislation, legislation, waiting for it, and I have seen the power of great moral causes. Although there is a wisdom in legislation which I would be far from invalidating, the forms of wholesome legislation, still I would balance that by the other consideration that it may take too long a time, and we may rely too much upon legislation. I rely upon reason and conscience. Churches are my congresses, and school-houses are my legislators. Kindness, equal, reciprocal, or identical interests—these are renovating influences; and I would not wait too long for laws, which at best are but as mills which must run by some external power. What is a windmill without wind, or a water-mill without a stream of water? Why put a mill upon the hill-top with a water-wheel, or in a valley if made with a sail? What are laws without public sentiment? They are water-mills without water, wind-mills without wind. We must fall back upon moral force. It may take a little more time, but we shall do the work more thoroughly; and I believe we shall yet see the day when, throughout the South, they will show an enthusiasm for liberty, and schools, and churches, and colleges, such as we have never seen even in the North; when every man shall sit under his own vine and fig-tree, blessed and blessing.”

Shortly after the assassination of President Lincoln he said, referring to its effect upon the South:

460“I know not how this may turn, so far as the South is concerned; I know not but that the cords will be drawn tighter than they would have been if Mr. Lincoln had been spared; yet I am not without hope that those men who have for four years learned almost nothing but to curse the name of our beloved and now martyred President, with the beginning of better thoughts and feelings may, by sorrow and by grief, be led back again toward a national feeling. The North has been unified by a sorrow of one kind; and I would fain hope that God, in His providence, will make use of this great affliction to produce the beginnings of compunction and the return of national feeling throughout the South. And so the death of Mr. Lincoln may be blessed to them as well as to us.

“But, brethren, my heart goes out toward my whole country. I mourn for those outcast States. The bitterness of their destruction; the wrath that has come upon them; their desolation—you know nothing of these. The sublimest monument that has ever been reared in this world to testify God’s abhorrence of cruelty and rebellion has its base as broad as fifteen States. No pyramid was ever lifted up in such awful majesty as is the pyramidal overthrow of these fifteen States. And I pray God that this last, cruelest, wickedest offspring of the Rebellion may be an expiation through which they shall be redeemed. Christ, when He died, prayed for those that crucified Him, and instead of asking vengeance on them, said: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”

Just before going to Fort Sumter in April, 1865, he said from his pulpit:

“I would be no man’s servant to go to add additional sorrows to those that already press and weigh down the South.... I go to say to them, ‘Sound government has come back; beneficent government has come back; the day has dawned; and, as brethren to brethren, I come to bring you good tidings of great joy’”—a feeling that was more fully expressed in his speech at the fort.

Shortly after Johnson had been called to the presidential chair, and before the open rupture with Congress and his subsequent extravagant follies, Mr. Beecher wrote him:

“The two points that have lain most at my heart are:

“1. That the government should not allow itself, by any temptation, to invade the true State rights. The temptation is 461strong. But the precedent established might by and by plunge us again into great trials, and even conflicts.

“2. The other point is, the necessity of securing for freedmen the kindness and good-will of Southern white men. Their fate will largely depend upon their neighbors’ dispositions toward them. Northern people nor the government can hold them up long if all the State populations around them are inimical.

“In both these respects, as in others, I perceive that your sentiments are enlightened and statesmanlike.

“May it please Almighty God to endue you with health and strength to complete the work which you have so auspiciously begun!”

By the autumn of 1866 there had grown up in the Republican party quite a minority, called “Conservative Republicans,” who were opposed to the policy of exclusion; and an effort was made that fall to elect Congressmen who would be in favor of admitting the Southern States again under such terms and restrictions as might be deemed necessary. This feeling was quite marked among the soldiers themselves, who, with the chivalry natural to bravery, were opposed to humiliating a conquered enemy. In September a National Convention of Soldiers and Sailors was called to be held on the 17th in Cleveland, Ohio, to give expression to this feeling. The preparatory committee sent to Mr. Beecher an invitation to serve as chaplain to the convention, saying in it:

“Your name has been selected by the Executive Committee from sincere admiration of your character, and as the only tribute within their power to pay in acknowledgment of your noble devotion to the cause of the Union, and your earnest and unceasing efforts in behalf of our soldiers and sailors during the recent war.

“The Executive Committee also find in your course since the termination of the struggle substantial harmony with the views to which they desire to give effect in the convention—your eloquence and the just weight of your name being employed to enforce upon the country a generous and magnanimous policy toward the people of the lately rebellious States, and a prompt reconstruction of the Union under the Constitution as the best means of regaining the national tranquillity which the country so much needs, and readjusting the rights of all sections, under the 462new order of things, on a basis of law, order, Christian brotherhood, and justice.

“In the call for the convention, which the undersigned have the honor to transmit herewith, you will see fully set forth the motives which actuate the military and naval defenders of the Union in their present unusual course of taking part in a political movement; and it is our hope—as we have always looked to you in the darkest days of the war for inspiration, aid, and the cheering sympathy of a noble heart, never failing to find them—that you will consent to invoke the Divine Blessing upon the Convention of the Soldiers and Sailors of the United States who served during the late Rebellion, and who approve the restoration policy of President Johnson and the principles announced by the recent national convention of Philadelphia—the first convention since 1860 in which all the States of our beloved Union were represented.”

As the convention was called for a time when he was prostrated by his annual “hay cold,” he was obliged to decline, but wrote to them what has since become famous as his first Cleveland letter.

This invitation, which seems so proper and natural to-day, and the letter in reply recapitulating the views which, as we have seen, had been expressed again and again in public, to the intense astonishment of Mr. Beecher produced a perfect tornado, and for a few days he was in the centre of a wild and furious whirlwind that threatened to destroy his influence in public affairs—then very great—and even to rend his church asunder. It seems impossible, as we look back twenty years, to believe that such results could have followed such a cause.

It would seem, as we follow the exposition of his views almost daily on this subject, as though the public, and certainly his friends, would have become fully accustomed to them, and would have recognized the object for which he strove; and the sudden, almost blind outburst of anger, indignation, and grief that followed the Cleveland letter, can only be explained on the theory that the course of President Johnson had so exasperated the Northern feelings, that the people, fairly beside themselves with anger, indignation, and suspicion, could see nothing right in what he did or advised, and would not permit any one to speak a kind word either for him or any of the views that he advocated.

463Eighteen years later, looking back upon the accomplishment of that which he had so strenuously advocated, and seeing men commending as wisdom that which they had then condemned as folly, he recalls this incident in his life, which, like many others before and since, awaked the mournful prophecies of timid friends. From his Thanksgiving sermon, November 27, 1884, we quote:

This letter was published by the convention in the hope that 469it would make an impression on the public mind. It did. Their most sanguine expectations were more than realized in that respect. But it was a step in advance of the prevailing public sentiment, and, like such steps, was largely misunderstood or misrepresented.

The partisan Republican press at once assailed Mr. Beecher, some bitterly, some indignantly, and some compassionately. Read hastily, it was construed as a declaration against the Republican party and in favor of President Johnson, who by this time had come in violent collision with Congress and the general sentiment of the North. The President’s course was regarded as treacherous, and a feeling of hatred was spreading through the North, so intense that it was only necessary for him to advocate any measure to have it looked upon with suspicion and be bitterly opposed. Many of Mr. Beecher’s personal friends were alarmed and distressed, fearing that he was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. He was overwhelmed with letters full of fear—fear for the country, fear for the Republican party, fear for him and his future usefulness. Some who had been among his intimate friends attacked him openly and fiercely in the public prints. The Independent, whose editorship he had but recently resigned, and to which he was still a regular contributor, in its leading editorial, from the pen of Theodore Tilton, attacked him with intense and persistent bitterness. Writing shortly afterwards to a friend, he said:

“The rage and abuse of excited men I have too long been used to, now to be surprised or daunted.... I stood almost alone, my church, in my absence, full of excitement; all my ministerial brethren, with a few honorable exceptions, either aloof or in clamor against me; well-nigh the whole religious press denouncing me, and the political press furious.”

On the other hand, many thoughtful, earnest men agreed with the letter and commended it most earnestly. We quote from a letter received from Dr. Stephen H. Tyng as a type of this class:

“I have just read your admirable letter in the Times of to-day. My eyes are wet with tears of sympathy and thanksgiving. You have expressed in terms and with beauty peculiar to yourself precisely what I have in my humble way thought and felt.... The recognition and establishment of our Union on the 470basis of undisputed loyalty to the national government, unlimited liberty to the people, universal fidelity in payment of our responsibility, and generous reciprocation and acknowledgment of mutual kindness and confidence among all portions of our territory and all classes of our people, is to me the one great immediate end for us to strive for. I have not a doubt that all our interests and hopes, social, moral, and economical, are far safer in the union of our States and the complete acknowledgment of them all, than they can be in its refusal—nay, that they are safe in no other course. I cannot justify the partisan and acrimonious action which resists and impedes this immediate union.... The country has been much indebted to you for faithful and powerful defence, but it has never had more occasion to honor you than for the letter which I have read this morning....”

The reply to Dr. Tyng, written some days before the second letter, is valuable as showing how little his critics understood Mr. Beecher’s position, and with what unreasonable and passion-blinded haste they jumped to the conclusion that he had abandoned the Republican party, become a Johnson man, Copperhead, etc.:

On the 7th of September Mr. Beecher received a letter from Dr. R. S. Storrs, then an intimate friend, which expressed the feelings of not a few of his friends. In this he urged Mr. Beecher to make a fuller and more explicit statement of his position, and to show plainly that he was not in sympathy with Johnson, Seward, etc., in their general attitude. “A vast number of people who have loved and honored you for years are really beginning to believe that you have gone over bodily; of course all those who know you as I do, know this to be an utter misapprehension of your position.”

Many of the members of Plymouth Church shared the common 472misapprehension, while many saw plainly what Mr. Beecher was seeking, and sympathized with him. As a consequence the church was deeply stirred and in commotion.

To quote again from Mr. Beecher:

“Not many days after, President Johnson began that ill-favored journey, known as ‘swinging around the circle,’ during the progress of which his temper, attitude, and injudicious speeches thoroughly alarmed the community.

“It was believed that he was betraying the country, and that all that had been gained by the war was about to be lost by the treachery of the President. The public mind was greatly inflamed, and my Cleveland letter was received with violent protests. Many personal friends and members of Plymouth Church were greatly exercised.

“There was a great pother made about that. My own friends were very hot. Some dove into the newspapers, some into letters. They flew thick and fast all around about me. Neighboring ministers thought that I was unseated and disrupted for ever. In the midst of it all I knew I was right, and that if I had patience others would know that I was right. And they did, though they still talk about that greatest blunder of my life, ‘the Cleveland letter.’ I am going to send down that document to my children as one of the most glorious things that I ever did in my life. But such was the excitement and clamor that I thought it wise to alleviate the fear and trouble of my people by giving a fuller view of the ground of my first letter and to confute the idea that I had abandoned the Republican party, so I wrote the second letter to a friend to read to the church, assuming the same position, but with explanatory reasoning.” This was the second so-called “Cleveland Letter”:

We give a few extracts from this letter, which was a very long one, covering nearly the same ground as the first, only giving his reasons more fully:

At the conclusion of his Thanksgiving sermon from which we have already quoted, after reviewing these letters, he summed up the subject:

“My dear friends, if I had written that for to-day I could not have written it better, and I do not think it needs to be written any better. I stand on that, and I have read it this morning 477not only because inspired by the parallelism, but because it has been represented that my Cleveland letter was the greatest blunder of the day; and then, worse than that, that I backed down from it and retracted it. And I have read, therefore, both of them, in parts, so far as bears more immediately on questions of to-day, that you may know that God gave me the light to do one of the best things I ever did when I wrote that letter; and that He gave me the grace to stand on it without turning back for one single moment; and that He has given me grace to lay my path, by sight, along those two letters—hindsight and foresight—from that day down to this; and that He has given me grace to withstand the impleadings of those that I love dearly, not only of my immediate household but of my blood and kindred; of those that are in the church, that are to me as my own life, and those that are of the political party with which I have labored thus far.

“Still seeing that luminous light, as God reveals it to me, I have walked in it and toward it, and abide in that same direction to-day; and, God helping me, so will I live to the end.”

To most of his friends the second letter gave great relief. The excitement in the church was quickly allayed, and, as it abated, the calm second-sight of his people began to see more and more in the letters in which they could agree.

After the second letter Dr. Storrs wrote again:

In letters to prominent public men and journalists Mr. Beecher urged that the conservative Republicans should express themselves plainly and clearly for the speedy reunion of the loyal Southern States and restoration of a more kindly feeling, but that this should be done, not in opposition to the Republican 478party, but within it. He was emphatic that the work of reconstruction could not then be safely left to the Democratic party. As soon as the public began to understand, what one would think had been plainly apparent at the start, that it was not, and had not been, his intention to leave the Republican party, but to urge the party to take up speedy reconstruction as its line of policy, and that he was laboring to create a sentiment within the party in its favor, the general excitement began to abate, and soon the bitterness, except with a few extremists, passed away.

A few sparks which took their heat from this fierce excitement remained, however, smouldering unnoticed and unsuspected, to aid, a few years later, in creating the most terrible and fiery ordeal that ever a good man was called to undergo, since the time of Him who came on earth to give Himself a voluntary sacrifice, that through His death the world might live; whose tender kindness, patient forgiveness, and generous self-sacrifice were made the guide and rule of life, so far as human nature could, by him whose life we seek to portray.

The “Silver Wedding” of Plymouth Church—Children’s Day—Services in the Church—Reunion of old Members—Historical Reminiscences—Dr. Storrs’s Tribute.

As in nature violent storms are often succeeded by peaceful calms, and as the sun shines brightest and the air seems clearest and most purified after the thunder-storm has broken and passed away, so in Mr. Beecher’s life we find that the stormy trials that beset him, at different periods, were followed by calms, in which the sun of popular favor shone the brightest; by periods of peace, during which he seemed endowed with increased power for useful work.

It was his lot to be generally a few years ahead of the times, but it was his good fortune to live to see his views accepted, and to find his hottest critics standing on the very ground, that they had so fiercely assailed him for occupying, but just a short time before.

So, for some years after 1866, we find him working with increased power and usefulness in his church, from the lecture platform, and through the columns of the press. His church had never been more prosperous, his people never more active in all departments of good work; never had he had so wide a field in which to labor. His sermons, which at first had only been printed in certain papers, were now issued in book-form, and were read wherever the English tongue prevailed.

From his pulpit went forth words of cheer, of hope and love, that lifted up weary hearts, that infused new life in desponding souls, that shed a new light in upon spirits that had lived in the darkness of sin, throughout the civilized globe. His sermons were translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian. No four walls, no State boundaries, nor the limits of any one nation, held his congregation.

In this period he undertook, in addition to his ordinary duties and labors, the principal literary work of his life, writing “Norwood,” 480completing the first volume of “The Life of Christ,” organizing and carrying on the Christian Union as its editor-in-chief.

Though the shadows of the coming trouble began, during the later part of this period, to fall across his path, at times darkening and oppressing his inner life, yet to the world, to the church, and to his friends it seemed as if a lasting season of peace and prosperity had settled down upon Plymouth Church, and its pastor, promising many years of uninterrupted and blessed usefulness.

October 10, 1872, completed the full quarter-century of Mr. Beecher’s pastorate at Plymouth Church. His people determined to celebrate in fitting manner this “Silver Wedding,” as it was called. It was decided to devote the week in which the anniversary occurred to the celebration of this jubilee.

In the minds of his people there might well have been some little feeling of pride and triumphant jubilation. They had seen Plymouth, from the little handful, twenty-one in all, whose organization had awakened prophecies of a speedy death, grow to the great church of over twenty-seven hundred, with its three large Sunday-schools—Plymouth, Bethel, and Mayflower—the nurseries of the church, where nearly three thousand scholars gathered every Sunday to learn the way of life. They had seen its influence extended throughout the entire nation, throughout the civilized globe, a power for good. They had seen churches by the score spring from its loins, and not a few had they seen, in periods of weakness when liable to fail, kept alive, nourished, and sustained by its strong hand until strong enough to stand alone.

Its history formed a part of the nation’s history in the dark days of slavery, in the struggle for national existence, and the exciting period of reconstruction, as has been well said: “For the better part of a generation Plymouth Church, under the influence of Mr. Beecher, has been a conspicuous light among the churches of the land. It has been the birthplace of countless good works which have blessed the whole community. It has been the nursery of noble impulses, of free thought, of patriotism, of generous and inspiriting actions. Its pupils have gone out into all parts of the country, carrying its fresh spirit with them, to infect other communities. Its influence is felt from Maine to the Pacific, and its 481memory is to-day affectionately cherished by thousands who were never within its walls and never saw its preacher.”

But in Mr. Beecher’s heart, while not forgetful of the glorious record of his church, the predominating feeling was one of profound gratitude to God.

In his Friday night prayer-meeting preceding the jubilee he expressed his feelings to his people:

“If I thought next week was to be a kind of historical glorification of this church; still worse, if I thought it was to be a sort of personal glorification, I should shrink from it with more than dislike—with positive loathing. It has pleased God to recognize the instrumentality of this church in the work it has done for the last quarter of a century; but, after all, the reason of its success, the absolute cause of its moral power, has been the presence of God, and the preaching of the Lord Jesus Christ, here during the last quarter of a century; and if we have a celebration, it ought to be a celebration of what the Lord has done among us. The feeling ought to be that of gratitude, and of the most profound recognition of the goodness and mercy and loving-kindness of our Lord and Saviour, who has walked in our households and in the midst of this artificial Christian family, and has not ceased to do us good, for the past twenty five years.

“So, that all the services of the week may be infused with a more reverent and loving sense of the Lord’s mercy to us, I hope you will give yourselves to prayer in your closets and in your homes. May it be a week, not for the laudation of men or of churches, but for a grateful recognition of God’s way with us, and of that dear name which should be dearer to us every day that we live, until we shall see Him in His glory for ever.”

Monday, October 7th, was the first day of the jubilee. This was “Children’s day,” the exercises being devoted principally to the Sunday-schools.

In the afternoon the three schools united in one column and marched past Mr. Beecher’s house; as they filed by, the schools gave their pastor, as he stood upon his doorstep, a marching salute. Each child as it passed cast a flower at his feet, until he stood literally embanked in flowers. The day was wondrously beautiful, sunny, clear, and crisp—as though glorious October, nature’s painter, catching the prevailing enthusiasm, was consciously contributing its share to make the occasion a success. 482Mr. Beecher was deeply touched. “We gave Monday to the children—and a beautiful day it was—and a sight brighter than which I shall not see until I look in the New Jerusalem, and see all the children who have left us for that better land.”

Tuesday, as “Teachers’ day,” was devoted to a reunion of the teachers and officers then serving or who had done duty in either of the three Sunday-schools.

Wednesday, as “Members’ day,” was like a great family reunion: it was the home day.

The church auditorium, the lecture-room and Sunday-school rooms, decorated with flowers, were thrown open to the members. We quote a description of the decorations: “What with the warbling of sweet-voiced birds, the profusion of leafy and floral decorations artistically arranged, the many beautiful paintings, the liquid, melodious strains from a band of musicians with stringed instruments stationed in the gallery, the picturesque though sober dresses of the lady-promenaders, but, above all, the vocal sound of animated, sparkling conversation, a kaleidoscopic picture was presented which awakened and gratified all the senses, and which, however, could only be appreciated by an eye-witness.”

The exercises were eminently social, a part of the evening being devoted to humorous reminiscences, by the older members, of the “early days.” Music and a lunch helped to increase the general enjoyment.

Thursday, “Historical day,” was, more perhaps than any other, a public day. As the name indicates, it was devoted to a review of the church, its growth in size, in works, and its ever-extending influence for good. From Mr. Beecher’s speech we give only the opening and closing paragraphs, which briefly review the beginning of his pastorate in Plymouth Church, his purpose in his work, and its continuance to that time:

“At my first coming I had no plans; I had marked out no future; I had no theories to establish, no system to found, no doctrines to demolish, no oppugnation of any kind. I remember distinctly that over and over again I held account with myself; and I came into this field simply and only to work for the awakening of men, for their conversion to Christ, and for their upbuilding in a Christian life. I had almost a species of indifference as to means and measures. I cared little, and perhaps too 483little, whether I had or had not a church-building. I thought of one thing—the love of Christ to men. This, to me, was a burning reality. Less clearly than now, perhaps, did I discern the whole circuit and orb of the nature of Christ; but with a burning intensity I realized the love of God in Jesus Christ. I believed it to be the one transcendent influence in this world by which men should be roused to a higher manhood, and should be translated into another and better kingdom. My purpose was to preach Christ to men for the sake of bringing them to a higher life. And though I preferred the polity and economy of the Congregational Church, yet I also felt that God was in all the other churches, and that it was no part of my ministry to build up sectarian walls; that it was no part of my ministry to bombard and pull down sectarian structures; but that the work of my ministry was to find the way to the hearts of men, and to labor with them for their awakening, and conversion, and sanctification.

“I have said that I had no theory; but I had a very strong impression on my mind that the first five years in the life of a church would determine the history of that church and give to it its position and genius; that if the earliest years of a church were controversial or barren it would take scores of years to right it, but that if a church were consecrated, and active, and energetic during the first five years of its life, it would probably go on through generations developing the same features. My supreme anxiety, therefore, in gathering a church, was to have all of its members united in a fervent, loving disposition; to have them all in sympathy with men; and to have all of them desirous of bringing to bear the glorious truths of the Gospel upon the hearts and consciences of those about them....”

“I bless God when I look back. I have lived my life, and no man can take it from me. The mistakes that I have made—and they are many—none know so well as I. My incapacity and insufficiency none can feel so profoundly as I.... And yet I have this witness: that for twenty-five years I have not withheld my strength, and have labored in simplicity and with sincerity of motive for the honor of my God, and for the love that I bear to you, and for the ineradicable love that I have for my country and for the world.

“My time is drawing near; but if I should fall to-morrow, I have lived. I have seen this land rise up from its drunkenness 484and its shame. I have seen the original principles of liberty, which had well-nigh been buried, come like Lazarus forth from the grave. What if, for the first few steps of the new life—bound hand and foot in grave-clothes, and with a napkin about his head, staggering somewhat—it knew not how to find the rightful path? Our country is free; and it has pleased God to give you and me some part in the work of enfranchisement and the settlement of this land on the old foundation of truth and justice and universal liberty.

“I have lived through a quarter of a century, and had a free platform; and you have sustained me in speaking just what I thought to be true. You have never servilely believed anything because I said it; for you have maintained opinions different from mine from the beginning to the end....

“I am admonished that the best of my years are past and that my sun will soon go down. Let it go down to-day, to-morrow, whenever it may please God. I will not ask for the lengthening out of one single day. I have lived a happy life. I have been a happy pastor. I have loved you and been beloved by you. I have seen your children come up and walk in the ways of life. I have gone down with hundreds to see the framework laid in the dust, believing that the spirit was above. We have come down together, without a quarrel, without a break, and without a shaking of confidence, to this blessed hour. And now, in these closing words which I address to you and to all who are present, join with me, not in self-gratulation, nor in the interchange of compliments, but in thanksgiving to Christ that has loved us, to the Spirit of God that has inspired us, and to the dear Father that has kept us together in the one household of faith, beloved and loving, thus far.”

Twenty-five years before Dr. Storrs gave the right hand of fellowship to Mr. Beecher at his installation, then to encourage him to future labor. Again he gives him the hand of fellowship, but now, in words tender and eloquent, to dwell on the work done, to congratulate him on the rich and abundant harvest he had garnered, and to testify his brotherly love and admiration. The scene was a solemnly touching one, as Dr. Storrs, in the words we quote, closed his glowing tribute to the man who, for twenty-five years, had stood by his side laboring for a common cause, and who had loved him as a brother:

485“At any rate, we have stood side by side in all these years; and they have been wonderful and eventful years.

“We have differed many times, but two men so unlike never stood side by side with each other, for so long a time, in more perfect harmony, without a jealousy or a jar! Though we have differed in opinion, we have never differed in feeling. We have walked to the graves of friends in company. We have sat at the table of the Lord in company. He knows, as he has said, that when other voices were loud and fierce in hostility to him mine never joined them. When other pens wrote his name, dropping gall and venom as they wrote it, my pen never touched the paper except in honor and admiration of him. And I know that whenever I have wanted counsel or courage given me from others, he has always been ready, from the overflowing surplus of his surcharged mind, to give them to me.

“So we have stood side by side—blessed be God!—in no spirit but of fraternal love, for that long space of twenty-five years which began with the Right Hand of Fellowship then, and closes before you here to-night.

“I am not here, my friends, to repeat the service which then I performed. It would be superfluous. When I think of the great assemblies that have surged and thronged around this platform, when I think of the influences that have gone out from this pulpit into all the earth, I feel that less than almost any other man on earth does he need the assurance of fellowship from any but the Son of God! But I am here to-night for another and a different service! On behalf of you who tarry, and of those who have ascended from this congregation; on behalf of Christians of every name throughout our city, who have had such joy and pride in him, and the name of whose town has, by him, been made famous in the earth; on behalf of all our churches, now growing to be an army; on behalf of those in every part of our land who have never seen his face or heard his voice, but who have read and loved his sermons, and been quickened and blessed by them; on behalf of the great multitudes 486who have gone up from every land which his sermons have reached—never having touched his hand on earth, but waiting to greet him by and by—I am here to-night [taking Mr. Beecher by the hand] to give him the Right Hand of Congratulation, on the closing of this twenty-fifth year of his ministry, and to say: God be praised for all the work that you have done here! God be praised for the generous gifts which He has showered upon you, and the generous use which you have made of them, here and elsewhere, and everywhere in the land! God give you many happy and glorious years of work and joy still to come in your ministry on earth! May your soul, as the years go on, be whitened more and more in the radiance of God’s light, and in the sunshine of His love! And, when the end comes—as it will—may the gates of pearl swing inward for your entrance, before the hands of those who have gone up before you, and who now wait to welcome you thither; and then may there open to you that vast and bright Eternity—all vivid with God’s love—in which an instant vision shall be perfect joy, and an immortal labor shall be to you immortal rest!”

“This magnificent concluding passage,” said the Brooklyn Union of the next day, “was uttered with an eloquence that defies description. At its conclusion Mr. Beecher, with tears, and trembling from head to foot, arose, and, placing his hand on Dr. Storrs’s shoulder, kissed him upon the cheek. The congregation sat for a moment breathless and enraptured with this simple and beautiful action. Then there broke from them such a burst of applause as never before was heard in an ecclesiastical edifice. There was not a dry eye in the house.”

Friday, “Communion day,” ended the jubilee. After a brief season of prayer and remarks, the solemn service of the Lord’s Supper closed the meeting, over two thousand persons participating in the communion.

The week was a blessed one for pastor and people, making stronger the bonds of love, confidence, and mutual trust that united them into a single church, and, no doubt, helped and strengthened both in the crossing of that stormy sea of trouble, at the very shore of which they were then standing.

Little could the people of Plymouth Church foresee as they crowded around their pastor, striving, in loving emulation, to out-do each other in marks of affection and confidence, that the most 487infamous conspiracy of modern times was rapidly involving pastor and church in a network of wicked lies.

None would have believed in those happy days that the very men who owed most to their pastor, who had received at his hands aid and comfort when most needed, whom he had nurtured and strengthened by his love, were using the very power they had derived through him, to destroy their benefactor; with the malignant ingenuity of the fallen angel, were weaving webs of falsehood and misrepresentation about his feet, working on his feelings, ever sensitive to any neglect of duty upon his part, by false statements of injury done by his thoughtlessness or neglect; cunningly interweaving his exaggerated outbursts of self-accusing grief with their falsehoods, prepared by them, with cool deliberation, to fit his words. They sought by his very horror of evil to give the appearance of evil. Closing his mouth by a pledge they well knew his honor would observe, they, disregarding their pledges, by busy whisperings strove to fasten suspicion on him, who, they knew, would not speak in self-defence.

The warmth of that heart that loved all mankind, that bore malice to none, but sought by greater loving-kindness to overcome enmity, returning good for evil, fell upon a serpent’s nest, warming into life the malignant, venomous brood, the intensity of whose desire to injure seemed in the proportion that each had been benefited. The eggs had hatched, and the serpents were daily growing stronger and more dangerous.

But least of all did Plymouth Church suspect that those whose hands they had just grasped in fraternal love, who, by their own teachings and their calling, should have been slow to believe evil of their brethren, would in a few short weeks join hands with her bitterest enemies, lending to them the moral support of their own blameless lives and high reputations, giving them advice, aid, and comfort, opening their churches as an asylum to the discontented and treacherous in Plymouth Church; and, even while the words of brotherly love and deep, abiding confidence, just flown from their lips, were ringing with joy and comfort in the heart of their brother, would lend the ears of ready listeners, to the base tales of baser men—men whom they themselves knew to be tainted in honor and morals—holding their cloaks to screen the would-be assassins.

The Conspiracy—Relations with Mr. Bowen—Disputes and Arbitration—Theodore Tilton’s Early Promise and Intimacy with Mr. Beecher—Bowen’s Ill-Will and Tilton’s Malice—Tilton discharged from Independent and Brooklyn Union—Tripartite Agreement—Moulton and Tilton conspire to Blackmail Mr. Beecher—Tilton consults Dr. Storrs.

While it will not be possible in the space of a volume such as this, nor at all desirable if it were possible, to go to any considerable extent into the details of that experience in Mr. Beecher’s life, commonly called “the Scandal,” yet no biography would be complete or truthful which ignored this period.

Therefore, while we avoid all those details likely to offend against a rational public sentiment, we shall try to give such an outline of the general facts as may be necessary for a clear understanding of this monstrous conspiracy.

To do this we must necessarily go back to the beginnings, some of which exerted a powerful influence on subsequent events. In 1856 Mr. Beecher was invited to become a contributor to the Independent, then published and controlled by Henry C. Bowen and his partner, Mr. McNamee. This was accepted, and in November of that year a contract was made between them to that effect.

This contract, with a few subsequent modifications, remained in force until the year 1860, when a new one was made by which Mr. Beecher became the editor-in-chief, Theodore Tilton, his assistant, relieving him wholly of the office routine work. Mr. Tilton was at this time a young man with the promise of a brilliant future before him. Determining upon journalism and public speaking as his profession, he sought to familiarize himself with the speeches and writings of those most prominent in his chosen field. Early in the “Fifties” he began reporting Mr. Beecher’s 489sermons for the Observer. This led to an acquaintance between them.

Tilton, though scarcely more than a boy, was even then very clever. His bright speeches, his boyish enthusiasm in following out the high purposes he had formed, the really manly aspirations he then felt, and, above all, his sunny disposition, soon won for him a very warm place in Mr. Beecher’s heart, which he only lost years later, when his uncontrollable egotism and vanity—the mildew of precocity—worked his destruction, wrecking his reputation, his morals, and his life.

Mr. Beecher delighted in aiding and promoting him, seeking by wise counsels to strengthen every good quality and to hold in check every malign tendency, advancing him as rapidly as possible in his profession. All this Mr. Tilton fully recognized, writing Mr. Beecher, a short time before he began his plotting:

“My Friend: From my boyhood up you have been to me what no other man has been, what no other man can be. While I was a student the influence of your mind on mine was greater than all books and all teachers. The intimacy with which you honored me for twelve years has been, next to my wife and family, the chief affection of my life. By you I was baptized; by you married; you are my minister, teacher, father, brother, friend, companion. The debt I owe you I can never pay. My religious life, my intellectual development, my open door of opportunity for labor, my public reputation—all these, my dear friend, I owe in so great a degree to your own kindness that my gratitude cannot be written in words, but must be expressed only in love.”

Early in their intimacy Tilton left the Observer and joined his fortunes to the Independent.

Through the affection and influence of his friend he was advanced steadily, until, in the fall of 1860 or early 1861, he was made assistant editor. In the spring of 1861 occurred an incident that was to produce ultimately no little trouble.

Mr. Beecher had from time to time bought, from Mr. Bowen’s dry-goods store, various articles to be sent to the Brooklyn Phalanx, a regiment largely enrolled from the youths and friends of Plymouth Church, and in which Mr. Beecher’s eldest son was an officer. These purchases were charged against Mr. Beecher’s salary account. In May, 1861, Mr. Bowen claimed that Mr. 490Beecher’s account had been very greatly overdrawn, by goods purchased and money drawn out. The matter was finally arbitrated, the arbitrator awarding Mr. Bowen $1,000, which was paid.

Whether it was the failure to receive all that he expected, or some other and unknown grievance, we cannot say, but from about this time began a feeling of hostility on the part of Mr. Bowen, which a few years later, after Mr. Beecher had finally left the Independent, took shape in scandalous whisperings behind Mr. Beecher’s back, but always so carefully guarded as not, at that time, to reach his ears.

In 1863 Mr. Beecher made his memorable visit to England. During his absence he arranged to have Mr. Tilton take the entire editorial charge of the Independent. In this the latter did so well, that in February, 1864, Mr. Beecher, being then in need of relief from the care and responsibility of his position, made a new arrangement with Mr. Bowen, whereby Mr. Tilton was to be retained as editor-in-chief, Mr. Beecher contributing editorially and by “Star articles” (his articles were unsigned, but marked with * at the foot, hence the name); the publication of his sermons and lecture-room talks being continued, his name remaining for a year as one of the editors. After one year Tilton was to be announced as the actual editor-in-chief.

In 1865, then, Theodore Tilton found himself at the head of one of the most influential papers in the land; for the Independent, though a religious paper, had, largely through the controversies on slavery, war, and other important topics carried on by Mr. Beecher in its columns, acquired a reputation and influence, in general public affairs, that was equalled by no other journal of its kind.

Soon Mr. Tilton’s inordinate conceit began to manifest itself. He was to supersede, in influence, his patron. From his lofty pedestal he could look down upon his old friend and adviser, dwarfed by comparison.

Already he had begun to entertain “advanced” ideas, repudiating as old-fogy and behind the times the principles and beliefs which he had received from his former instructor. Not content with his fancied overshadowing of Mr. Beecher, he began about this time to take part in Bowen’s campaign of scandalous whisperings; but when one of his tales came to Mr. 491Beecher’s ears he promptly denied it and assured Mr. Beecher that he had never said anything of the kind, that it was wholly false. This denial satisfied Mr. Beecher, who thought no more of the tale.

When in 1866 Mr. Beecher wrote his “Cleveland letters,” the Independent assailed him so virulently, through its editorial columns, that he felt he could no longer be connected with it, even as a contributor, and thereupon terminated his contract and all further connection with the paper. This was a further aggravation in Mr. Bowen’s eyes, as it was likely to be a pecuniary loss to the paper, and so to him. Shortly after this Mr. Tilton began in the editorial columns of the Independent to take a decidedly “advanced” stand upon religious and ethical subjects. His views began to savor very strongly of the atheistic, and he more than intimated a belief in theories, on the subject of marriage, that seemed hardly appropriate in the columns of a religious newspaper; so that when he published his “Editorial Soliloquy” in 1867, there broke out an indignant protest both from the East and West against such a use of the columns of the Independent. Tilton’s course, together with Bowen’s retention of certain objectionable advertisements, threatened serious injury to the paper. Steps were taken to start a new religious paper in Chicago, to supersede the Independent in the West; at about the same time overtures were made to Mr. Beecher, to accept the control of a new paper to be started in New York. This alarmed Mr. Bowen, who at once promised to muzzle Tilton and prevent the publication of any more objectionable “views.” On this assurance the opposition to the Independent was suspended. The contract was a larger one, however, than Bowen had anticipated. Tilton soon began anew ventilating his theories, and in December, 1870, wrote an editorial so pronounced in its advocacy of his peculiar views, that the public patience was exhausted. The Advance was at once established in Chicago and became a formidable rival to the Independent, Dr. Edward Beecher, the elder brother of Henry Ward, being one of its promoters.

In the fall of 1869 the Christian Union was organized in New York City, and in January, 1870, Mr. Beecher took control of it. Bowen was in despair. Here were two dangerous rivals to his paper. He was afraid to discharge Tilton; he had said too much in his presence to care to offend him. He must in some way, however, get Tilton out of the editorial chair of the 492Independent. After some negotiation he arranged with Tilton that he should resign the editorship of the Independent, and a new contract was made by which he should take the editorship of the Brooklyn Union for five years, at five thousand dollars a year, and should be the chief contributor to the Independent, receiving a further five thousand dollars therefor. This change was effected on the 20th of December, 1870, and on the 22d his valedictory was published in the Independent. Up to the year 1870 Tilton could hardly be said to have been hostile to Mr. Beecher, certainly in no such sense as he was during the following year. At this time he looked upon him as his mental and social inferior, and not infrequently spoke of him patronizingly, as one whom he had outgrown, bestowing upon him a sort of affectionate pity because he had been cast in a mould so much smaller than his own. It is true that, in that kind of “strictest confidence” which always insures a quiet circulation, he whispered stories, from time to time, derogatory to Mr. Beecher’s reputation, but these were born of his vanity, rather than of malice. He was still able to see that his own vagaries did not meet with public favor. He felt that he was a little ahead of his times, and it might benefit him to saddle similar theories upon Mr. Beecher. He probably had no intention of doing an injury, at least at that time. With Mr. Bowen, however, it was different. Mr. Beecher’s resignation first from the editorship, and then as contributor, and withdrawing his sermons from the Independent, was an injury in his eyes for which Tilton’s appointment did not compensate, and seemed to intensify that ill-will which had its origin at the time of the pecuniary misunderstanding, already referred to. And now, to have Mr. Beecher’s brother participate in starting the Advance in Chicago, while he himself accepted the management of the Christian Union in New York—a paper that sprang at once into a very large circulation, threatening to crowd the Independent in the East as the Advance promised to do in the West—this capped the climax. Bowen’s dislike was the more intense since there seemed no way in which he could assail Mr. Beecher with any hope of success. His whisperings necessarily had to be guarded, and his confidants did not seem inclined, or able, to give him much comfort.

This hostility Mr. Beecher was aware of, though little suspecting at the time its extent, attributing it to the fact that he 493had been obliged to withdraw from the Independent, and take a stand squarely opposed to its apparent policy. For he wrote to a friend: “It is well known that I am in a positive antagonism with the whole general drift of the paper. Mr. Bowen will scarcely recognize me on the street, and feels bitterly my withdrawal from all part or lot in the paper.”

By December, 1870, Tilton’s attitude had become decidedly hostile. His patronizing had now begun to change into fear. For he thought that Mr. Beecher might become a dangerous rival; and when finally he was retired from the editorship of the Independent he felt sure that it was through some intentional and malign influence of Mr. Beecher. That his own conduct and expressed opinions were responsible for the change, his vanity would not permit him to think.

As soon as it was publicly known that Tilton had been deposed from the editorial chair of the Independent, the stories of his past life began to pour in on Mr. Bowen like a flood. The latter was alarmed and began to doubt the possibility of retaining him in any capacity.

The expression of this fear to mutual friends led to an interview between the two. Tilton characteristically mounted his high horse, and imperiously demanded an investigation and that he be confronted with his accusers. In a very few moments Mr. Bowen satisfied him that he was quite fully posted, and that an investigation was the last thing that he would desire.

Tilton then struck out on a new line of operations. Knowing Mr. Bowen’s fear and dislike of Mr. Beecher, intensified daily by the steadily increasing circulation of the Christian Union, Tilton cunningly began to suggest the great danger that threatened the Independent from the Christian Union.

He struck the keynote to Bowen’s animosity, and, skilfully working on his feelings, he suggested that their mutual welfare demanded the overthrow of Mr. Beecher. Bowen was all attention. To destroy Mr. Beecher, and cripple the Christian Union, would be a wonderful stroke of good-fortune.

After referring to the injuries that Bowen had suffered at the hands of Mr. Beecher, he suggested that he, too, had a grievance against him. This was news to Bowen, who eagerly besought Tilton to tell him what it was. He then stated that Beecher had been guilty of “improper proposals” to his wife. Bowen was 494quick to discover the situation. This was the first tangible bit of evidence which had ever come to him against Mr. Beecher. He had never dared publicly father any of his own stories.

Now, if Tilton would attack Mr. Beecher on such a charge, he could stand by and watch the fight without becoming involved himself, but would be ready, from his safe point of vantage, to take profit by the result, whichever way it ended. If Tilton succeeded, so much the better. If he failed, he would be rid of him; and would not be responsible for the attack, which Tilton would both originate and carry on.

Mr. Bowen suggested to Tilton the writing of a letter to Mr. Beecher, which was written, calling on him to resign his pastorate, and leave Brooklyn. This Bowen was to carry to Mr. Beecher, which he did.^[8]

Mr. Tilton, returning home, reported to his friend Francis D. Moulton what he had done, and was informed that he had made “a ——— fool” of himself, that he had put himself in Bowen’s hands. At this point the conspiracy may be said to have been born. With the conspiracy proper, from this time out, Mr. Bowen seems to have had nothing to do. Both Tilton and Moulton distrusted him. While his hostility towards Mr. Beecher did not abate, and he was soon afterwards clearly recognized as a bitter enemy, yet we do not learn that he ever thereafter actively co-operated with the two arch-conspirators; for a short time after Tilton’s letter he professed to be friendly to Mr. Beecher.

The carrying of Tilton’s letter to Mr. Beecher, and the calling in of Moulton, were the starting-point of this conspiracy.

Bowen, as we shall see later, discharged Tilton from both the Independent and the Union.

The latter was in desperate straits, and then it was that he and Moulton seemed to have come to the determination to try through Mr. Beecher to better Tilton’s fortunes. At the first it is highly improbable that either had any very definite plan of operations against Mr. Beecher, and certainly not the faintest idea of the desperate step they would finally be driven to by the 495logic of their own falsehoods. Little by little, deeper and deeper, they worked themselves into the mud and mire, until, as a last desperate venture, they were compelled to make the final plunge in the hope of forcing through to a solid footing. With this introduction we give Mr. Beecher’s account of this trouble in his own words, as written in 1874, when the facts were all fresh in his mind; condensing it somewhat to meet the requirements of our space, and omitting details which, though necessary then, need not now be gone into. This presents the history as he saw it, and shows how Moulton by cunning treachery wormed himself into Mr. Beecher’s confidence for the purpose of destroying him:

“Four years ago Theodore Tilton fell from one of the proudest editorial chairs in America, where he represented the cause of religion, humanity, and patriotism, and in a few months thereafter became the associate and representative of Victoria Woodhull and the priest of her strange cause. By his follies he was bankrupt in reputation, in occupation, and in resources. The interior history, of which I now give a brief outline, is the history of his attempts to so employ me as to reinstate himself in business, restore his reputation, and place him again upon the eminence from which he had fallen. It is a sad history, to the full meaning of which I have but recently awaked. Entangled in a wilderness of complications, I followed until lately a false theory and a delusive hope, believing that the friend who assured me of his determination and ability to control the vagaries of Mr. Tilton, to restore his household, to rebuild his fortunes, and to vindicate me, would be equal to that promise. This self-confessed failure has made clear to me what for a long time I did not suspect—the real motive of Mr. Tilton. My narrative does not represent a single standpoint only as regards my opinion of Theodore Tilton. It begins at my cordial intimacy with him in his earlier career, and shows my lamentation and sorrowful but hopeful affection for him during the period of his initial wanderings from truth and virtue. It describes my repentance over evils befalling him of which I was made to believe myself the cause; my persevering and finally despairing efforts to save him and his family by any sacrifice of myself not absolutely dishonorable; and my growing conviction that his perpetual follies and blunders rendered his recovery impossible. I can now see that he is and has been 496from the beginning of this difficulty a selfish and reckless schemer, pursuing a plan of mingled greed and hatred, and weaving about me a network of suspicions, misunderstandings, plots, and lies, to which my own innocent words and acts, nay, even my thoughts of kindness toward him, have been made to contribute.

“That I was blind so long to the real nature of the intrigue going on around me was due partly to my own overwhelming public engagements, partly to my complete surrender of this affair and all papers and questions connected with it into the hands of Mr. Moulton, who was intensely confident that he could manage it successfully. I suffered much, but I inquired little. Mr. Moulton was chary to me of Mr. Tilton’s confidences to him, reporting to me occasionally in a general way Mr. Tilton’s moods and outbreaks of passion only as elements of trouble which he was able to control, and as additional proofs of the wisdom of leaving it to him. His comment of the situation seemed to me, at the time, complete, immersed as I was in incessant cares and duties, and only too glad to be relieved from considering the details of such wretched complications, the origin and the fact of which remain, in spite of all friendly intervention, a perpetual burden to my soul. I would not read in the papers about it; I would not talk about it. I made Moulton for a long period my confidant and my only channel of information.

“From time to time suspicions were aroused in me by indications that Mr. Tilton was acting the part of an enemy; but these suspicions were repeatedly allayed by his own behavior towards me in other moods, and by the assurances of Mr. Moulton, who ascribed the circumstances to misunderstanding or to malice on the part of others. It is plain to me now that it was not until Mr. Tilton had fallen into disgrace and lost his salary that he thought it necessary to assail me with charges which he pretended to have had in mind for six months. The domestic offence which he alleged was very quickly and easily put aside, but yet in such a way as to keep my feelings stirred up, in order that I might, through my friends, be used to extract from Mr. Bowen $7,000, the amount of a claim in dispute between them. The check for that sum in hand, Mr. Tilton signed an agreement of peace and concord—not made by me, but accepted by me as sincere. The Golden Age had been started. He had the capital 497to carry it on for a while. He was sure that he was to lead a great social revolution. With returning prosperity he had apparently no griefs which could not be covered by his signature to the articles of peace.^[9] Yet the changes in that covenant, made by him before signing it, and represented to me as necessary merely to relieve him from the imputation of having originated and circulated certain old and shameless slanders about me, were really made, as now appears, to leave him free for future operations upon me and against me.

“So long as he was, or thought he was, on the road to a new success, his conduct toward me was as friendly as he knew how to make it. His assumption of superiority and magnanimity, and his patronizing manner, were trifles at which I could afford to smile, and which I bore with the greater humility since I still retained the profound impression made upon me as explained in the following narrative—that I had been a cause of overwhelming disaster to him, and that his complete restoration to public standing and household happiness was a reparation justly required of me, and the only one which I could make.

“But, with a peculiar genius for blunders, he fell almost at every step into new complications and difficulties, and in every such instance it was his policy to bring coercion to bear upon my honor, my conscience, and my affections, for the purpose of procuring his extrication at my expense. Theodore Tilton knew me well. He has said again and again to his friends that if they wished to gain influence over me they must work upon the sympathetic side of my nature. To this he has addressed himself steadily for four years, using as a lever, without scruple, my attachment to my friends, to my family, to his own household, and even my old affection for himself.

“Not blind to his faults, but resolved to look on him as favorably and hopefully as possible, and ignorant of his deeper malice, I labored earnestly, even desperately, for his salvation. For four years I have been trying to feed his insatiable egotism, to make the man as great as he conceived himself to be, to restore to popularity and public confidence one who, in the midst of my efforts in his behalf, patronized disreputable people and doctrines, refused when I besought him to separate himself from 498them, and ascribed to my agency the increasing ruin which he was persistently bringing upon himself, and which I was doing my utmost to avert. It was hard to do anything for such a man. I might as well have tried to fill a sieve with water. In the latter part of the history he actually incited and created difficulties, apparently for no other purpose than to drive me to fresh exertions. I refused to endorse his wild views and associates. The best I could do was to speak well of him, mention those good qualities and abilities which I believed him to possess in his higher moods, and keeping silent concerning the evil things which, I was assured and believed, had been greatly exaggerated by public report. I could not think him so bad as my friends did. I trusted to the germs of good which I thought still lived in him, to Mr. Moulton’s apparent power over him, and to the power of my persistent self-sacrifice.

“Mr. Moulton came to me at first as the schoolmate and friend of Mr. Tilton, determined to reinstate him, I at first suspected, without regard to my interests, but on further acquaintance with me he undertook and promised to serve his friend without doing wrong to me. He said he saw clearly how this was to be done, so as to restore peace and harmony to Mr. Tilton’s home, and bring a happy end to all misunderstandings. Many things which he counselled I absolutely refused, but I never doubted his professed friendship for me, after friendship had grown up between us; and whatever he wished me to do I did, unless it seemed to me wrong.

“My confidence in him was the only element that seemed secure in that confusion of tormenting perplexities. To him I wrote freely in that troublous time, when I felt that secret machinations were going on around me, and echoes of the vilest slander concerning me were heard of in unexpected quarters; when some of my near relatives were set against me, and the tattle of a crowd of malicious women, hostile to me on other grounds, was borne to my ears; when I had lost the last remnant of faith in Mr. Tilton or hope for him; when I heard with unspeakable remorse that everything I had done to stay his destruction had made matters worse and worse; that my attempt to keep him from a public trial (involving such a flood of scandal as has now been let loose) had been used by him to bring up new troubles; that his unhappy wife was, under his dictation, signing 499papers and recantations, and I knew not what; that, in short, everything was breaking up, and the destruction from which I had sought to save the family was likely to be emptied on other families, the church, the community, with infinite horrors of woe for me; that my own innocence was buried under heaps and heaps of rubbish, and nobody but my professed friend (if even he) could save us. To his assurances that he could still do so I gave at least so much faith as to maintain under these terrible trials the silence which he enjoined. Not until Mr. Tilton, having attempted, through Frank Carpenter, to raise money from my friends, openly assailed me in his letter to Dr. Bacon, did I break that silence, save my simple denial of the slanderous rumors against me a year before.

“On the appearance of the first open attack from Mr. Tilton I immediately, without consulting Mr. Moulton, called for a thorough investigation with a committee of my church. I am not responsible for the delay, the publicity, or the details of that investigation. All the harm which I have so long dreaded and have so earnestly striven to avoid has come to pass. I could not have further prevented it without a full surrender of honor and truth. The time has arrived when I can freely speak in vindication of myself. I labor under great disadvantages in making a statement. My memory of states of the mind is clear and tenacious, better than my memory of dates and details. During four troubled years, in all of which I have been singularly burdened with public labor, having established and conducted the Christian Union, delivered courses of lectures, preaching before the Theological Seminary of Yale College, written the first volume of the ‘Life of Christ,’ delivered each winter Lyceum lectures in all the North and West—all these duties, with the care of the great church and its outlying schools and chapels, and the miscellaneous business which falls upon a clergyman more than upon any other public man, I have kept in regard, and now, with the necessity of explaining actions and letters resulting from complex influences apparent at the time, I find myself in a position where I know my innocence without being able to prove it with detailed explanation. I am one upon whom trouble works inwardly, making me outwardly silent but reverberating in the chambers of my soul; and when at length I do speak it is a pent-up flood and pours without measure or moderation. I inherit a 500tendency to sadness, the remains in me of positive hypochondria in my father and grandfather, and in certain moods of reaction the world becomes black and I see very despairingly.

“If I were, in such moods, to speak as I feel, I should give false colors and exaggerated proportions of everything. This manifestation is in such contrast to the hopefulness and courage which I experience in ordinary times that none but those intimate with me would suspect one so full of overflowing spirit and eager gladsomeness to have within him a cave of gloom and despondency. Some of my letters to Mr. Moulton reflect this morbid feeling. He understood it, and at times reproved me for indulging in it. With this preliminary review I proceed to my narrative.

“Mr. Tilton was first known to me as a reporter of my sermons. He was then a youth just from school and working on the New York Observer. From this paper he passed to the Independent, and became a great favorite with Mr. Bowen. When, about 1861, Drs. Bacon, Storrs, and Thompson resigned their places, I became editor of the Independent, to which I had been from its start a contributor. One of the inducements held out to me was that Mr. Tilton should be my assistant and relieve me wholly from routine office work. In this relation I became very much attached to him. We used to stroll the galleries and print-shops and dine often together. His mind was opening freshly and with enthusiasm upon all questions. I used to pour out my ideas of civil affairs, public policy, religion, and philanthropy. Of this he often spoke with grateful appreciation, and mourned at a later day over its cessation.

“August was my vacation month, but my family repaired to my farm in June and July, and remained there during September and October. My labors confining me to the city, I took my meals in the families of friends, and from year to year I became so familiar with their children and homes that I went in and out daily almost as in my own house. Mr. Tilton often alluded to this habit, and urged me to do the same by his house. He used to often speak in extravagant terms of his wife’s esteem and affection for me. After I began to visit his house he sought to make it attractive. He urged me to bring my papers down there and use his study to do my writing in, as it was not pleasant to write in the office of the Independent. When I went to England 501in 1863 Mr. Tilton took temporary charge of the Independent. On my return I paved the way for him to take sole charge of it, my name remaining for a year, and then he becoming the responsible editor. Friendly relations continued until 1866, when the violent assaults made upon me by Mr. Tilton in the Independent, on account of my Cleveland letter, and the temporary discontinuation of the publication of my sermons in that paper, broke off my connection with it. Although Mr. Tilton and I remained personally on good terms, yet there was a coolness between us in all matters of politics. During this whole period I never received from Mr. Tilton or any member of his family the slightest hint that there was any dissatisfaction with my familiar relations to his household. As late, I think, as the winter of 1869, when going upon an extended lecturing tour, he said: ‘I wish you would look in after, and see that Libby is not lonesome or does not want anything,’ or words to that effect. Never by sign or word did Mr. Tilton complain of my visits to his family until he began to fear that the Independent would be taken from him, nor did he break out into violence until on the eve of dispossession from both the papers—the Independent and the Brooklyn Union—owned by Mr. Bowen.

“In the latter part of July, 1870, Mrs. Tilton was sick, and at her request I visited her. She seemed much depressed, but gave me no hint of any trouble having reference to me. I cheered her as best I could, and prayed with her just before leaving. This was our last interview before trouble broke out in the family. I describe it because it was the last, and its character has a bearing upon a later part of my story. Concerning all my visits it is sufficient to say that at no interview which ever took place between Mrs. Tilton and myself did anything occur which might not have occurred with perfect propriety between a brother and sister, between a father and child, or between a man of honor and the wife of his dearest friend; nor did anything ever happen which she or I sought to conceal from her husband.

“Some years before any open trouble between Mr. Tilton and myself, his doctrines, as set forth in the leaders of the Independent, aroused a storm of indignation among the representative Congregationalists in the West; and as the paper was still very largely supposed to be my organ, I was written to on the subject. In reply I indignantly disclaimed all responsibility for the views 502expressed by Mr. Tilton. It was understood that Mr. Bowen agreed, in consequence of proceedings arising out of this remonstrance, to remove Mr. Tilton or suppress his peculiar views, but instead of that he seemed firmer in the saddle than before, and his loose notions of marriage and divorce began to be shadowed editorially. This led to the starting of the Advance in Chicago, to supersede the Independent in the Northwest, and Mr. Bowen was made to feel that Mr. Tilton’s management was seriously injuring the business, and Mr. Tilton may have felt that his position was being undermined by opponents of his views with whom he subsequently pretended to believe I was in league. Vague intimations of his ‘feeling hard’ toward me I ascribed to this misconception. I had in reality taken no step to harm him.

“After Mr. Tilton’s return from the West in December, 1870, a young girl whom Mrs. Tilton had taken into the family, educated, and treated like an own child was sent to me with an urgent request that I would visit Mrs. Tilton at her mother’s. She said that Mrs. Tilton had left her home and gone to her mother’s in consequence of ill-treatment of her husband. She then gave an account of what she had seen of cruelty and abuse on the part of the husband that shocked me; I immediately visited Mrs. Tilton at her mother’s, and received an account of her home life, and of the despotism of her husband, and of the management of a woman whom he had made housekeeper, which seemed like a nightmare dream. The question was whether she should go back or separate for ever from her husband. I asked permission to bring my wife to see them, whose judgment in all domestic relations I thought better than my own; and accordingly a second visit was made. The result of the interview was that my wife was extremely indignant toward Mr. Tilton, and declared that no consideration on earth would induce her to remain an hour with a man who had treated her with a hundredth part of such insult and cruelty. I felt as strongly as she did, but hesitated, as I always do, at giving advice in favor of a separation. It was agreed that my wife should give her final advice at another visit. The next day, when ready to go, she wished a final word; but there was company, and the children were present, and so I wrote on a scrap of paper, ‘I incline to think that your view is right, and that a separation and a settlement of support will be wisest, and that in his present desperate state her 503presence near him is far more likely to produce hatred than her absence.’

“Mrs. Tilton did not tell me that my presence had anything to do with this trouble, nor did she let me know that on the July previous he had extorted from her a confession of excessive affection for me.

“On the evening of December 27, 1870, Mr. Bowen, on his way home, called at my house and handed me a letter from Mr. Tilton. It was, as nearly as I can remember, in the following terms:

“‘Henry Ward Beecher: For reasons which you explicitly know, and which I forbear to state, I demand that you withdraw from the pulpit and quit Brooklyn as a residence.

“I read it over twice, and turned to Bowen and said: ‘This man is crazy; this is sheer insanity,’ and other like words. Mr. Bowen professed to be ignorant of the contents, and I handed him the letter to read. We at once fell into a conversation about Mr. Tilton. He gave me some account of the reasons why he had reduced him from the editorship of the Independent to the subordinate position of contributor—namely, that Mr. Tilton’s religious and social views were ruining the paper. But he said as soon as it was known that he had so far broken with Mr. Tilton, there came pouring in upon him so many stories of Mr. Tilton’s private life and habits that he was overwhelmed, and that he was now considering whether he could consistently retain him on the Brooklyn Union or as chief contributor to the Independent. We conversed for some time, Mr. Bowen wishing my opinion. It was frankly given. I did not see how he could maintain his relations with Mr. Tilton. The substance of the conversation was that Tilton’s inordinate vanity, his fatal facility for blundering (for which he had a genius), and ostentatious independence in his own opinions, and general impracticableness, would keep the Union at disagreement with the political party for whose service it was published; and now, added to all this, these revelations of these promiscuous immoralities would make his connection with either paper fatal to its interests. I spoke strongly and emphatically under the great provocation of his 504threatening letter to me and the revelation I had just had concerning his domestic affairs.

“Mr. Bowen derided this letter of Tilton’s which he had brought to me, and said earnestly that if trouble came out of it I might rely upon his friendship. I learned afterwards that in the further quarrel, ending in Tilton’s peremptory expulsion from Bowen’s service, this conversation was repeated to Mr. Tilton. Although I have no doubt that Mr. Tilton would have lost his place at any rate, I have also no doubt that my influence was decisive and precipitated his final overthrow. When I came to think it all over, I felt very unhappy at the contemplation of Mr. Tilton’s impending disaster. I had loved him much, and at one time he had seemed like a son to me.

“But now all looked dark; he was to be cast forth from his eminent position, and his affairs at home did not promise that sympathy and strength which make one’s house, as mine has been, in times of adversity, a refuge from the storm and a tower of defence.

“It now appears that on the 29th of December, 1870, Mr. Tilton, having learned that I had replied to his threatening letter, by expressing such an opinion of him as to set Mr. Bowen finally against him, and bring him face to face with immediate ruin, extorted from his wife, then suffering under a severe illness, a document incriminating me, and prepared an elaborate attack upon me.

“In my then morbid condition of mind I thought that this charge, although entirely untrue, might result in great disaster, if not absolute ruin. The great interests which were entirely dependent on me, the church which I had built up, the book which I was writing, my own immediate family, my brother’s name, now engaged in the ministry, my sisters, the name which I had hoped might live after me and be in some slight degree a source of strength and encouragement to those who should succeed me, and, above all, the cause for which I had devoted my life, seemed imperilled. It seemed to me that my life-work was to end abruptly and in disaster. My earnest desire to avoid a public accusation, and the evils which must necessarily flow from it, and which now have resulted from it, has been one of the leading motives that must explain my action during these four years with reference to this matter.

505“It was in such a sore and distressing condition that Mr. Moulton found me. His manner was kind and conciliatory; he seemed, however, to be convinced that I had been seeking Tilton’s downfall, that I had leagued with Mr. Bowen against him, and that I had by my advice come near destroying his family. I did not need any argument or persuasion to induce me to do, and say, anything which would remedy the injury, of which I then believed, I had certainly been the occasion if not the active cause. But Mr. Moulton urged that, having wronged so, the wrong meant his means of support taken away, his reputation gone, his family destroyed, and that I had done it. He assured me of his own knowledge that the stories which I had heard against Mr. Tilton, and which I had believed and repeated to Mr. Bowen, were all false. I was persuaded into the belief of what he had said, and felt convicted of slander in its meanest form. He drew the picture of Mr. Tilton wronged in reputation, in position, wronged in purse, shattered in his family where he would otherwise have found a refuge, and at the same time looking upon me out of his deep distress, while I was abounding in friends, most popular, and with ample means; he drew that picture—my prosperity overflowing and abounding, and Tilton’s utter degradation. I was most intensely excited. Indeed, 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, telling what my ideas were of the obligation of friendship and of the sacredness of the household; denying, however, an intentional wrong, saying that if I had been the cause, however remotely, of that which I then beheld, I never could forgive myself, and heaping all the blame on my own head. The case, as it then appeared to my eyes, was strongly against me. My old fellow-worker had been dispossessed of his eminent place and influence, and I had counselled it. His family had well-nigh been broken up, and I had advised it; his wife had been long sick and broken in health and body, and I, as I fully believed it, had been the cause of all this wreck by continuing that blind heedlessness and friendship which had beguiled her heart and had roused her husband into a fury of jealousy, although not caused by any intentional act of mine. And should I coldly defend myself? Should I pour indignation upon this lady? Should I hold her up to contempt as having thrust her affections upon me unsought? 506Should I tread upon the man and his household in their great adversity? I gave vent to my feelings without measure. I disclaimed with the greatest earnestness all intent to harm Theodore in his home or his business, and with inexplicable sorrow I both blamed and defended Mrs. Tilton in one breath.

“I had not then the light that I now have. There was much then that weighed heavily upon my heart and conscience which now weighs only on my heart. I had not the light which analyzes and discriminates things. By one blow there opened before me a revelation full of anguish: an agonized family, whose inmates had been my friends, greatly beloved; the husband ruined in worldly prospects, the household crumbling to pieces, the woman, by long sickness and suffering, either corrupted to deceit, as her husband alleged, or so broken in mind as to be irresponsible; and either way it was her enthusiasm for her pastor, as I was made to believe, that was the germ and beginning of the trouble. It was for me to have forestalled and prevented that mischief. My age and experience in the world should have put me more on my guard. I could not at that time tell what was true, and what was not true, of all the considerations urged upon me by Mr. Tilton and Moulton. There was a gulf before me in which lay those who had been warm friends, and they alleged that I had helped to plunge them therein. That seemed enough to fill my soul with sorrow and anguish. No mother who has lost a child but will understand the wild self-accusation that grief produced, against all reason, blaming herself for what things she did do, and for what she neglected to do, and charging upon herself, her neglect or heedlessness, the death of her child, while ordinarily every one knows that she had worn herself out with her assiduities.

“Mr. Moulton and Mr. Tilton both strove to obliterate from my mind all belief in the rumors that had been circulated about Mr. Tilton. There was much going on in silencing, explaining, arranging, etc., that I did not understand as well then as now. But of one thing I was then convinced, viz., that Mr. Tilton had never strayed from the path of virtue. I was glad to believe it true, and felt how hard it was that he should be made to suffer by evil and slanderous foes. I could not explain some testimony which had been laid before me; but, I said, there is undoubtedly some misunderstanding, and if I knew the whole I should find 507Theodore, though with obvious faults, at heart sound and good. These views I often expressed to intimate friends in spite of their manifest incredulity, and what, in the light of the facts, I must now call their well-deserved ridicule. Mr. Moulton lost no occasion of presenting to me the kindest view of Mr. Tilton’s character and conduct. On the other hand, he complained that Mrs. Tilton did not trust her husband or him, and did not assist him in his effort to help Theodore. I knew that she distrusted Mr. Moulton, and felt bitterly hurt by the treatment of her husband. I was urged to use my influence with her to inspire confidence in Moulton and to lead her to take a kinder view of Theodore. Accordingly, at the instance of Mr. Moulton, on February 7, 1871, I wrote a letter to her of that date, designed for the purpose of giving her confidence in Mr. Moulton.

“In my letter to Mrs. Tilton I alluded to the fact that I did not expect, when I saw her last, to be alive many days. That statement stands connected with a series of symptoms which I first experienced in 1856. I went through the Fremont campaign, speaking in the open air three hours at a time, three days in the week. On renewing my literary labors I felt I must have given way; I very seriously thought that I was going to have apoplexy or paralysis, or something of the kind. On two or three occasions, while preaching, I should have fallen in the pulpit if I had not held on to the table. Very often I came near falling in the streets. During the last fifteen years I have gone into the pulpit, I suppose a hundred times, with a very strong impression that I should never come out of it alive. I have preached more sermons than any human being would believe, when I felt all the while, that whatever I had got to say to my people I must say then, or I never would have another chance to say it. If I had consulted a physician, his first advice would have been, ‘You must stop work.’ But I was in such a situation that I could not stop work. I read the best medical books on symptoms of nervous prostration, and overwork, and paralysis, and formed my own judgment of my case. The three points I marked were: I must have good digestion, good sleep, and I must go on working. These three things were to be reconciled; and in regard to my diet, stimulants, and medicines I made the most thorough and searching trial, and, as the result, managed my body so that I could get the most work out of it without essentially 508impairing it. If I had said a word about this to my family, it would have brought such distress and anxiety on the part of my wife, as I could not have borne. I have for many years so steadily taxed my mind to the utmost that there have been periods when I could not afford to have people express even sympathy with me. To have my wife or friends anxious about my health, and showing it to me, would be just the drop too much.

“In 1863 I came again into the same condition just before going to England, and that was one of the reasons why I wished to go. The war was at its height. I carried my country in my heart. I had the Independent in charge, and was working, preaching, and lecturing continually. I knew I was likely to be prostrated again.

“In December, 1870, the sudden shock of these troubles brought on again these symptoms in a more violent form. I was very much depressed in mind, and all the more, because it was one of those things that I could not say anything about; I was silent with everybody. During the last four years these symptoms had been repeatedly brought on by my intense work, carried forward on the underlying basis of so much sorrow and trouble.

“My friends will bear witness, that in the pulpit, I have very frequently alluded to my expectation of sudden death. I feel that I have more than once, already, been near a stroke that would have killed or paralyzed me, and I carry with me now, as I have so often carried, in years before this trouble began, the daily thought of death, as a door which might open for me, at any moment, out of all cares and labors into most welcome rest.^[10]

509“During the whole of the year 1871 I was kept in a state of suspense and doubt, not only as to the future of the family, for the reunion and happiness of which I had striven so earnestly, but as to the degree to which I might be personally subject to attack and misconstruction, and the trouble be brought into the church and magnified by publicity. The officers of the church sought to investigate Mr. Tilton’s religious views and moral conduct. On the latter point I had been deceived into the belief that he was not in fault. As to the religious views, I still hoped for a change for the better. It was proposed to drop him from the list of members for non-attendance; and as he asserted to me his withdrawal, this might have been done, but his wife still attended the church and hoped for his restoration. I recollect having with him a conversation in which he dimly hinted to me that he thought it not unlikely that he might go back into his old position. He seemed to be in a mood to regret the past. And so, when I was urged by the Examining Committee to take some steps, I said I was not without hopes that by patience and kindness 510Tilton might come back again into his old church works and be one of us once more. I therefore delayed a decision upon this point for a long time. Many of our members were anxious and impatient, and there were many tokens of trouble from this quarter. Meanwhile one wing of the female-suffrage party, had got hold of his story in a distorted and exaggerated form, such as had never been intimated to me by Mr. Tilton or his friends. I did not then suspect what I now know, that these atrociously false rumors originated with Mr. Tilton himself. I only saw the evil growing instead of diminishing, and perceived that while I was pledged to silence, and therefore could not speak in my own defence, some one was for ever persevering in falsehood, growing continually in dimensions, and these difficulties were immensely increased by the affiliation of Mr. Tilton with the extremists in the female-suffrage party.

“The winter following (1871-72) Mr. Tilton returned from the lecture-field in despair. Engagements had been cancelled, invitations withdrawn, and he spoke of the prejudice and repugnance with which he was everywhere met as indescribable. I urged him to make a prompt repudiation of these women and their doctrines. I told him that no man could rise against the public sentiment with such a load. Mr. Tilton’s vanity seldom allowed him to regard himself as in the wrong or his actions faulty. He could never be made to believe that his failure to rise again was caused by his partnership with these women, and by his want of sensible work, which work should make the public feel that he had in him power for good. Instead of this he preferred, or professed, to think that I was using my influence against him, that I was allowing him to be traduced without coming generously to the front to defend him, and that my friends were working against him; to which I replied that, unless the laws of mind were changed, not Almighty God Himself could lift him into favor if these women must be lifted with him. Nevertheless I sought in every way to restore peace and concord to the family which I was made to feel had been injured by me and was dependent on my influence for recovery.

“But one thing was constant and apparent—when Tilton, by lecturing or otherwise, was prosperous, he was very genial and affectionate to me. Whenever he met rebuffs and was in pecuniary trouble, he scowled threateningly upon me as the author of 511his troubles, and Moulton himself seemed at times to accuse me of indifference to Tilton’s misfortunes.

“I now come in my narrative to give an account of the origin of the somewhat famous tripartite agreement. Early in February, 1872, Mr. Tilton returned to the city thoroughly discouraged with the result of his lecturing tour. The Golden Age (a paper organized for Tilton by his friends), which had then been established for about twelve months, had not succeeded, and was understood to be losing money. His pecuniary obligations were pressing, and although his claim against Bowen for the violation of his two contracts had a year previously been put under the exclusive control of Moulton with a view of settlement, it had not as yet been effected. About this time Mr. Moulton, who was sick, sent for me and showed me a galley-proof of an article, prepared by Mr. Tilton for the Golden Age, in which he embodied a copy of a letter written by him to Mr. Bowen, dated January 1, 1871, in which he charged Mr. Bowen with making scandalous accusations against my character. This was the first time that I had ever seen these charges, and I had never heard of them except by mere rumor, Mr. Bowen never having, at any time, said a word to me on the subject. I was amazed at the proposed publication. I did not then understand the real object of giving circulation to such slanders. My first impression was that Mr. Tilton designed, under cover of an attack upon me in the name of another, to open the way for the publication of his own pretended personal grievances. I protested against the publication in the strongest terms, but was informed that it was not intended as an hostile act to myself, but to Mr. Bowen. I did not any the less insist upon my protest against this publication. On its being shown to Mr. Bowen he was thoroughly alarmed, and speedily consented to the appointment of arbitrators to bring about an amicable settlement. The result of this proceeding was that Mr. Bowen paid Mr. Tilton over $7,000, and that a written agreement was entered into by Bowen, Tilton, and myself of amnesty, concord, and future peace.^[11] It was agreed that the offensive article, the publication of which had produced such 512an effect upon Mr. Bowen and secured a settlement, should be destroyed without seeing the light. It was an act of treachery peculiarly base that this article was permitted to get into hands which would insure its publication, and that it was published. I 513was assured that every vestige of it had been destroyed, nor until a comparatively recent period did I understand how Mr. Tilton secured its publication without seeming to be himself responsible for the deed.

“After vainly attempting to obtain money both from myself and my wife as the price of its suppression, the Woodhull women published their version of the Tilton scandal in the November of 1872. The details given by them were so minute, though so distorted, that suspicion was universally directed toward Mr. Tilton as the real author of this, which he so justly calls ‘a wicked and horrible scandal,’ though it is not a whit more horrible than that which he has now fathered, and not half so wicked, because they did not have personal knowledge of the falsity of their story, as Mr. Tilton has of his.

“To rid himself of this incubus Mr. Tilton drew up a voluminous paper called ‘A true statement,’ but which was familiarly called ‘Tilton’s case.’ Tilton’s furor for compiling statements was one of my familiar annoyances. Moulton used to tell me that the only way to manage him was to let him work off his periodical passion on some such document, and then to pounce on the document and suppress it. This particular ‘true statement’ was a special plea in abatement of the prejudices excited by his Woodhull partnership. It was a muddle of garbled statements, manufactured documents, and downright falsehoods. This paper I knew he read to many, and I am told that he read it to not less than fifty persons, in which he did not pretend to charge immorality upon his wife; on the contrary, he explicitly denied it and asserted her purity, but charged me with improper overtures to her. It was this paper which he read to Dr. Storrs, and poisoned therewith his mind, thus leading to the attempt to prosecute Tilton in Plymouth Church, the interference of neighboring churches, and the calling of the Congregational Council. After the Woodhull story was published, and while Mr. Tilton seemed really desirous for a short time of protecting his wife, I sent through him the following letter to her:

As we have seen, the “Woodhull scandal,” at the secret instigation of Tilton, was published late in October, 1872.

On the 2d of November Dr. Storrs wrote to Mr. Beecher:

At this time Mr. Beecher felt that he was bound in honor to be silent. It was not until the spring of 1873, when realizing that Tilton was industriously, in person, and through his friends, whispering tales against his character, and stimulating the publication of the scandal, that he felt himself relieved from this obligation. Then he published a card in the Brooklyn Eagle, emphatically branding the stories as false and challenging the production of any evidence against him.

But, at the time of Dr. Storrs’s letter, to say a little and not say all, would be worse than silence, while to confide the whole matter to Dr. Storrs would necessitate repeating the statements against Tilton and Bowen, which would be a breach of the tripartite agreement (a pledge which he alone had observed). He did not call on the doctor or answer the letter. He kept silent. 521A short time later (December 16) Tilton called upon Dr. Storrs with a friend, and read to him his so-called “true statement,” which, as we have seen, he had drawn up to counteract, as he pretended, the Woodhull scandal. In this he asserted most positively his wife’s innocence, and charged Mr. Beecher with “improper proposals.”

The effect of this interview played an important part in the subsequent events. We are not aware that Dr. Storrs ever went directly to his old friend and laid what he had heard before him, or indignantly denied the charges as a slander; but, on the contrary, almost in the face of his letter of November 2d proffering aid, he lent his ear to tales, carried by such a man as he knew Tilton to be; and we very soon find him acting, in conjunction with Dr. Budington, as the recognized champion and adviser of Mr. Beecher’s enemies; his hostility, later on, ripening into the most intense personal bitterness, the fierce heat of which seemed to grow stronger rather than weaker as years rolled by, and did not seem to abate even when the cold hand of death fell upon his former friend. We have searched in vain for any reasonable justification for this sudden change, from the most glowing friendship, to the most scorching enmity. We feel unwilling to believe the commonly accepted theory of jealousy, while the doctor’s own suggestion that his feelings were hurt by Mr. Beecher’s neglect of his friendly overtures, seems belittling to a man so gifted and refined, and one cast in so large an intellectual mould.

We say that injured feelings were the reason suggested; for when, about a year later, he appeared in open hostility to Mr. Beecher, and wondering friends inquired the reason, he stated in effect that he felt hurt by Mr. Beecher’s neglect to even answer his friendly letter (of November 2, 1872), though admitting that it did not necessarily call for an answer. Later, after the publication of the scandal, Mr. Beecher explained to both Drs. Storrs and Budington the reason for his silence, which explanation they then professed to accept as satisfactory.^[12] On November 7, 1873, a friend of both Dr. Storrs and Mr. Beecher called on the doctor, to whom he stated that while Mr. Beecher’s enemies had 522come to him, and he had not felt it right to refuse to hear what any one had to say, Mr. Beecher’s friends had not come near him; that he himself (Dr. S.) had never once commenced a conversation with any one on this subject, and that he was sorry that he could not see this affair as Mr. Beecher’s friends did, and wished he could believe that he was suffering for the sins of others.

From his own statement, then, it would seem that he gave his ear to the tale-bearer, listening to all that was brought to him by Mr. Beecher’s enemies, but he himself never once sought for information from Mr. Beecher’s friends.

About the first of June, 1873, Mr. Beecher had become satisfied that there was no longer any use of trying to help Mr. Tilton, his eyes being at last opened to the fact, that Tilton had been deceiving him right along, and little by little had been dealing scandalous stories out to the public. He declared that he would stand it no longer, and when it was stated that Mrs. Woodhull had implicating letters from him he published the following card in the Brooklyn Eagle:

“I have just returned to the city to learn that application has been made to Mrs. Victoria Woodhull for letters of mine supposed to contain information respecting certain infamous stories against me. I have no objection to have the Eagle state, in any way it deems fit, that Mrs. Woodhull, or any other person or persons who may have letters of mine in their possession, have my cordial consent to publish them. In this connection, and at this time, I will only add that the stories and rumors which for some time past have been circulated about me are grossly untrue, and I stamp them, in general and in particular, as utterly false.

“Brooklyn, N. Y., June 30, 1873.”

At this time the stories afloat were vague and general.

After-Effects—Charges against Tilton—Advisory Council—Investigating Committee called by Mr. Beecher—Its Report—Dropping Mr. Moulton—Council called by Plymouth Church.

In October, 1873, formal charges were preferred against Theodore Tilton, by Plymouth Church, for slandering his pastor. He replied to the clerk of the church, that he was not, and for four or more years had not been, a member of the church. The church then voted to drop his name from the rolls, agreeably to the provisions of its manual, relating to such cases.

Most of the sister churches were content that Plymouth Church should attend to her own affairs in her own way. Not so the Church of the Pilgrims (Dr. Storrs) and the Clinton Avenue Church (Dr. Budington).

They felt themselves outraged by this action of Plymouth, in omitting to try the charges preferred against Tilton.

Special meetings were called in these churches, and a committee of seven appointed in each, to formulate, and send, a letter of remonstrance to Plymouth Church. After a considerable, but ineffectual correspondence between the churches, and consultations between the pastors, looking to an amicable adjustment of their differences, the two dissatisfied churches called the “Advisory Council” of 1874, to advise them as to their course toward Plymouth Church.

While the correspondence and conferences referred to were going on, a very serious difficulty broke out in Dr. Budington’s church, which at one time threatened to split it asunder. A large number of influential members denounced the manner of calling the special meeting, at which the committee of seven was appointed, and by which the church was committed to its position of hostility to Plymouth, as being irregular, and in violation 524of their own rules.^[13] This led to a number of stormy meetings, in which great bitterness was felt and expressed on both sides.

Mr. Beecher, instead of fomenting this difficulty—which might easily have been made the means of turning the tables upon his clerical critics, and forcing them from the attack to the defensive—or even sitting still, to await any advantages that might accrue to him or his church, came at once to Dr. Budington’s relief. On January 12th he wrote to a prominent member of the latter’s church, urging in the strongest terms that both the doctor, and the protestants, should seek for some intermediate ground on which they could meet in peace, and that the best men of the church should join to avert the catastrophe which seemed impending. He also wrote an earnest letter to Dr. Storrs, that he 526should join with him in seeking the peace and unity of Dr. Budington’s church.

Mr. Beecher and his Sister, Mrs. H. E. B. Stowe.

At the same time he wrote a long letter directly to Dr. Budington, in which, among other things, he said:

He also advised such of his friends in Dr. Budington’s church as he met, to the same effect. Ultimately the storm blew over, though a feeling of soreness remained in the Clinton Avenue Church for a long time.

On March 24, 1874, the Advisory Council convened in Dr. 527Budington’s church. Plymouth Church had been invited to be present at the council by pastor and committee, “to correct any statement of fact that may seem to them erroneous, and to furnish any further and special information the council may request.”

To this Plymouth Church replied “that the calling of this ex-parte council to consider the affairs of a church which has not declined a mutual council is the consummation of a course of proceedings against which, as irregular and unwarrantable, we have felt bound to protest from the beginning. That we recognize in the statement, the letter-missive, and the invitation as in former communications addressed to us, a persistent attempt to put this church under accusation and on trial, and that we cannot accept the invitation of these two churches to appear before a council in the calling of which we have been permitted to take no part, in which we have not been offered the right of equal members, and in which we are not even allowed to be ordinary defendants, but only to be witnesses to correct errors and answer questions propounded to us.”

On the 28th the council made its “deliverance,” but so like a Delphic oracle that neither its friends nor its foes seemed able to agree upon its exact meaning.

As nearly as we can make out from the “deliverance” itself, and the comments made upon it by members of the council, it was to the effect: 1. That Plymouth Church was not en regle in its disposal of Mr. Tilton’s case; 2. That the two sister-churches were unwise and hasty; and 3. That Plymouth Church should not be read out of fellowship.

Very shortly after the adjournment of the council a series of letters were written by Dr. Bacon, of New Haven, and published in the Independent, which reflected very strongly upon Mr. Tilton, who, in the latter part of June, published a statement in which he made an open charge; in this he declared that Mr. Beecher had committed an offence against him which he forbore to name. This was the first public charge made by Mr. Tilton. Up to this time the stories afloat were vague and indefinite, impossible of tracing to their source.

Mr. Beecher was absent from the city when Tilton’s statement was published, but, returning the next day, at once sent the following to the gentlemen named therein:

These names were selected after conference with the Examining Committee of the church, most of them being suggested by that committee. Two of the gentlemen named were members of the Examining Committee, which immediately ratified the selection, and by formal vote made them a sub-committee of its own.

After the committee had been organized and begun its examination Mr. Beecher wrote and sent the following letter:

”Gentlemen of the Committee: In the note requesting your appointment I asked that you should make full investigation of all sources of information. You are witnesses that I have in no way influenced or interfered with your proceedings or duties. I have wished the investigation to be so searching that nothing could unsettle its results. I have nothing to gain by any policy of suppression or compromise.

“For four years I have borne and suffered enough, and I will not go a step further. I will be free. I will not walk under a 529rod or yoke. If any man would do me a favor, let him tell all he knows now. It is not mine to lay down the law of honor in regard to the use of other persons’ confidential communications; but, in so far as my own writings are concerned, there is not a letter nor document which I am afraid to have exhibited, and I authorize any and call upon any living person to produce and print forthwith, whatever writings they have from any source whatsoever.

“It is time, for the sake of decency and of public morals, that this matter should be brought to an end. It is an open pool of corruption, exhaling deadly vapors.

“For six weeks the nation has risen up and sat down upon scandal. Not a great war nor a revolution could more have filled the newspapers than this question of domestic trouble; magnified a thousandfold, and, like a sore spot in the human body, drawing to itself every morbid humor in the blood. Whoever is buried with it, it is time that this abomination be buried below all touch or power of resurrection.”

The committee commenced their sittings on the 28th of June and did not complete their report until the 28th day of August. The committee requested the attendance of thirty-six witnesses, and endeavored to obtain such facts as were relevant to the inquiry from all attainable sources of evidence. In their report they stated that “most of the persons named have attended as requested before the committee. One notable exception is Francis B. Carpenter. Francis D. Moulton promised to testify fully, but has failed to do so. He has submitted three short statements in writing to the committee, consisting chiefly of reasons why he declined to testify, and of promises to testify at the call of the committee. The committee have called him three times, with the results stated. In addition to the evidence of the persons named, we have examined a considerable number of letters and other documentary evidence which, in some way, were supposed to relate to the subject-matter of inquiry. We have held in the prosecution of our investigations twenty-eight sessions.”

Mr. Tilton appeared and presented a partial statement, finally refusing any further examination. Mrs. Tilton was examined, and most emphatically and solemnly denied the charge which her husband had made. Mr. Beecher was also examined; the substance of his statement we have already presented. While the 530committee was in session, and on the 21st of July, Mr. Tilton published a statement in the Brooklyn Argus, in which for the first time he made the specific charge of adultery. Up to this time, in his private statements, he had charged “improper proposals”; this statement he had made repeatedly, in confidence, to many different persons, and had incorporated in his so-called “true statement,” which he had shown to several; in this, in the most positive manner, he had denied that his wife had been guilty. The reason for this change of position will be made apparent later.

The committee in their report, after exhaustively reviewing the evidence, concluded:

This report, with its conclusions, was presented to the church on Friday evening, the 28th, and accepted with great enthusiasm by a unanimous vote, the immense throng, nearly three thousand in number, rising en masse when the vote was put.

531The terrible struggle in silence had passed, and to Mr. Beecher the relief at feeling that he could speak out in his own defence was unutterable. He spoke of it often and strongly:

“And what was most singular was that when the church came into the eclipse I came out of it. I had had my time when I was dumb and opened not my mouth, and was led as a sheep to the slaughter; but when the trouble came upon the whole church, with its intense suffering, there came to me emancipation. God was pleased to uphold me as I walked alone and in silence, and afterwards He gave me such relief that during the two or three years in which the church was shrouded in great anxiety I was filled with trust and courage, and was enabled all the time to lift up the church and carry it hopefully along from Sabbath to Sabbath.”

“ ... I have rolled off my burden; I am in the hands of God; I am certain of salvation and safety in God, and I do not give it any lower application; but I am hidden in His pavilion, I am surrounded by His peace, and I have got back, through storms and troubles, to the simplicity and the quiet enjoyment which belonged to me many years ago. My thought, my feeling, and my soul run very quiet; and it is the result, not so much of any visible and external thing, as that I am sure I am surrounded by the hand of my God. I live in Him, and He lives in me, and He gives me the promised peace.”

The publication of Mr. Beecher’s statement (a short time prior to the committee’s report) was as great a relief to Mr. Beecher’s friends, as the opportunity to make it had been to him. Many who trusted him implicitly, believing that there was some reason for his silence, could not but wonder what it might be; and when they learned that he had suffered reproach in silence, rather than open the doors to the vile flood which would deluge the land, bringing sorrow to hundreds of homes, unwilling to violate the pledge he had given to Tilton and Bowen until the former’s treachery at last compelled him, their loving confidence and sympathy were only intensified.

The clouds of mystery had been cleared away, and all was plain as noonday. We have room to quote but one of the many letters received, as an apt expression of the feelings produced by the statement. We give entire the letter of President Porter, of Yale College:

Early in the sessions of the committee Mr. Tilton withdrew—as we understand, not liking to be followed up on cross-examination—threatening to institute legal proceedings against Mr. Beecher, and, as preliminary thereto, published his statement of July 21.

We have alluded to the fact that at this stage Tilton wholly changed the nature of his charge. In all the stories which he and Moulton had told to various friends at different times, and in the statements which he had prepared and shown in confidence, the charge was always “improper proposals” and an emphatic assertion of his wife’s innocence. Now he proposed to stake all on one cast of the dice. He would bring a suit, and, if he could get no more help, he would at least, so his vanity and Mr. Beecher’s evil-wishers assured him, crush Mr. Beecher. Indeed, 533he and Moulton were cornered, and must resort to some desperate measures or surrender themselves to everlasting infamy. Had they been left to themselves, it is perhaps doubtful if they would have attempted so desperate a remedy, even in self-defence; but there were those, not a few, who egged them on, contributing to the expense of the suit, glad to keep up the attack on Mr. Beecher, provided only their names were not brought out.

But an action at law would not lie for merely “improper proposals”; it must go further than that. The case must be reconstructed. In no published statement, up to this time, had Tilton made any definite charge. Now he would put his charge in such shape as would serve the purposes of a suit; hence the statement of July 21, followed by a similar statement from Moulton published in the Graphic on August 21. The same day Tilton began his action against Mr. Beecher, placing his damages at $100,000.

On the 3d of October both Tilton and Moulton were indicted for criminal libel by the Grand Jury of Kings County, on Mr. Beecher’s complaint. (After the failure of the jury to agree in the civil suit, this was nolle-prossed.)

Tilton’s suit came on for trial the 6th of January, 1875, before Judge Joseph Neilson, of the Brooklyn City Court. It is not necessary to go into the details of this trial. The same evidence, substantially, was presented as was received by the investigating committee, and as appeared in the published statements. For six months the case occupied the time of the court and jury, the testimony covering several thousand pages of printed matter.

The case was submitted to the jury the 24th day of June. For nine days the jury strove to reach an agreement, finally being discharged the 2d day of July, standing three for plaintiff and nine for defendant.

We are informed, on the authority of one of the jurors, that several times they stood eleven to one in defendant’s favor, and once all agreed on a verdict for defendant, when a juror unfortunately remarked that his son had wagered a large sum on a verdict for the defendant; this statement split the jury at once, and from thence on they remained three to nine, until they were discharged. The case was never brought to trial again, the plaintiff wholly abandoning it. It is well known that after plaintiff had abandoned his case, his leading counsel, Hon. William A. 534Beach, frequently and publicly declared that the trial of the cause had convinced him of Mr. Beecher’s innocence, and that he felt as though they had been a pack of hounds trying to pull down a noble lion. Five years later he expressed similar views to the writer.

In the course of the trial Mrs. Moulton took the stand against Mr. Beecher. With downcast eye, and hesitating voice, she corroborated her husband.

Before the trial she withdrew from the public service of Plymouth Church, and became a constant attendant at the Church of the Pilgrims (Dr. Storrs).

Plymouth Church could no longer tolerate her within its membership. It was fully believed that, under the coercion of her husband, she had committed perjury during the trial, and had grossly slandered her pastor. This would have been the ground of charges against her, but the church was advised that to try her on any charge based upon her testimony in court, while the suit was still pending (plaintiff’s attorneys had renoticed the cause for a new trial, shortly after the disagreement), might involve them in a contempt of court, and, in any event, would be construed as an attempt to intimidate one of plaintiff’s most important witnesses. But, since she had persistently absented herself from the services of the church, she could be dropped under the seventh rule of the church manual. She was accordingly notified of the proposed action of the church and invited to be present on the 4th of November. After hearing her defence through her legal counsel, her name was dropped from the rolls by a vote of the church.

She at once demanded a mutual council, to be called by Plymouth Church and herself. Plymouth Church protested against Drs. Storrs’s and Budington’s churches participating therein, both of whom she had named, on the ground that they were obviously committed to her side and could not be impartial, but at the same time stated that they would go on with the council. Mrs. Moulton declined unless the protest were withdrawn. This being refused, she withdrew.

About this time it was being rumored in certain circles, and notably in Boston, that Mr. Beecher and his church had some great secret that they were concealing from the world, and for this reason had declined the mutual council which Mrs. Moulton 535had proposed—forgetting that Mrs. Moulton was the one who had abandoned the council, and further forgetting that an opportunity had been offered to any who knew anything detrimental to Mr. Beecher, to testify against him, first before the committee, that sat for two months, and then in the trial, that lasted over six months. Friends of Mr. Beecher wrote to him from Boston of this feeling. He sent word at once to a friend to get the doubters together, and that his brother, Dr. Edward Beecher, would meet them and answer all questions. From this friend we received the following account of the meeting:

“Immediately I set about the work of collecting those who, I thought, were honorable men, but misinformed into believing many things in the case which I knew to be false.... I did not invite a man who had given signs of being a friend of your father, but I asked every man of weight in the community whom I had reason to believe was prejudiced against him, and every man, to whom I had access, who had expressed to my knowledge a judgment hostile to him.

“The majority accepted.... My parlors were filled.... At the appointed hour a hack arrived from the depot, and out stepped your father, followed by his brother. He entered the parlors, and said in substance:

“‘Gentlemen, I have been told that some of you feel that there is a lack of frankness on my part with reference to the painful matter in controversy, and that there is a desire, either on my part or on the part of my friends, to cover up and conceal facts. If you think so you are in error. Our first desire is to make everything known. But it is, we find, impossible to do so, because so many false rumors are flying about, and everything we say gets into the papers twisted awry. I have come here to beg you to ask any questions you desire. Do not spare my feelings. Do not be restrained by any consideration of delicacy. The more searching, the more crucial your questions are, the kinder you will be. I will answer any question you can ask pertaining to this affair.’

“Hour after hour questions were asked. They were put one at a time, slowly. Some seemed but slightly relevant. Some made my blood boil to hear. Some seemed such as a judge might ask of a convicted criminal before pronouncing sentence. But every question was answered categorically, when that was 536possible, but always fully and exhaustively, so that the questioner pronounced himself entirely answered by the reply.

“During the entire session there did not fall from your father’s lips one impatient word, one harsh rejoinder. Not by a gesture did he give evidence that he suffered. Only the quick flush that came at times upon his cheek, showed the keenness of the torture caused him by this inquisition.

“Before he left I asked each one present, privately, if there was any question he could think of, an answer to which would, in his opinion, throw light upon the matter, which had not been asked. In every case I received a negative reply.”

After-Effects of the Conspiracy—Calling Council of 1876—Principle of Selection—Mr. Beecher Cautions his Church—Bowen Reappears; Proposes a Secret Tribunal—Mr. Beecher’s Reply—Bowen Dropped by Plymouth Church—Deliverance of Council sustaining Plymouth—Mr. Beecher’s Persecutors Denounced—Special Tribunal.

But now the organized determination to break down Mr. Beecher’s ministry and overthrow his church manifested itself by a new line of tactics.

There were at this time a few members whose relation to the church was very peculiar, who were neither in it nor out of it, apparently, who did not ask, or who refused positively, to take letters to other churches, who were not amenable to the discipline of the church, but who stood off, would not attend its meetings nor observe its ordinances, and who, when dealt with fraternally, in every way the church knew how, to procure them peaceably to sever their connection and relieve the church from responsibility, refused to do it or neglected to do it; and then, when it was proposed to drop them, without any reflection more than belonged to the nature of the case, they threatened, “If you drop us we will call a council.” There were at one time four councils threatened, by four different members on these grounds. It soon became very clearly understood, that the tactics of the adversary were now, to wear out the patience of the people, by a continuous series of councils, which would at last weary men from coming to a church where there was such incessant trouble.

It was in consequence of these tactics, that Plymouth Church determined to end all such annoyances, by calling a National Advisory Council, that should look through its rules and principles, and its entire administration under them; to have it of such magnitude, and made up of such churches and men, as that its deliverances would be final, making an end of all these controversies and giving the church solid ground to go on.

538Invitations were sent to one hundred and seventy-two churches, to be represented by pastor and delegate, and twenty ministers without charges, principally theological writers and professors in theological colleges. None were invited from New York City or Brooklyn, because of the general local feeling.

The principal questions submitted were, substantially, whether Plymouth Church had acted contrary to the word of God or the principles of Christian justice in allowing to itself in any case any other mode of terminating membership than death, letters of dismission, and excommunication?

2. What course ought it to pursue towards those who persistently absented themselves from its services for various personal reasons?

3. And towards those who were reported as having made insinuations affecting the character of other members, but who neither admit nor deny such reports?

4. Whether the church should have called a mutual council to investigate the charges against its pastor when so required by a member who submits no charges, and more than a year after a full investigation by the church, in which the pastor had been sustained by a unanimous vote?

5. Whether its course in the case of Mrs. Moulton had been wise and just?

6. Whether, in its maintenance of order, it had gone beyond its rights, so as to justly forfeit its claim to the confidence and fellowship of Congregational churches?

The letter-missive was dated February 1, 1876, and the council was called for the 15th.

The principle upon which the council was made up, we can learn from a letter written January 28, 1876, by Mr. Beecher to an eminent doctor of divinity whose advice he wished respecting certain churches in his vicinity:

“Allow me to say a word as to the principles of selection in this council. It will be gathered from the whole land, as far West as the Mississippi. It leaves out men committed to a policy, or who are known to be working in league with adversary churches. But I wish to have honest men, capable of judging upon facts and evidence, who are not so obstinate that they will not yield to conviction, or so tied to theories that they will look at everything under a bias. I don’t care whether 539they like me or not, whether they agree with my views, whether they approve or disapprove of all the policy of Plymouth Church. I only want men who will be candid and who will act impartially.”

Quite a number attended who had been members of the prior council of 1874; and when the council met, a considerable majority—their views having been acquired from newspaper reports—entertained grave doubts as to the regularity of Plymouth Church in its previous conduct. The effect which the evidence presented had upon their minds will appear later on.

At the Friday night prayer-meeting just preceding the sitting of council, Mr. Beecher cautioned his people respecting their conduct during the council.

“This church has for years been called to go through deep waters. For more than twenty years we had well-nigh unabated prosperity, and we were almost ready to boast that we had such wise methods of government and such signal presentations of truth as made our church life easy; that we had not the vexations which belonged to other churches; and it is not unlikely that we may have become proud and self-sufficient. But certainly for the last few years God has been dealing with us as with sons, and has chastened us; and it becomes us to bear in mind that the best gift of God to an individual or to a church is that kind of chastisement which works out trust, patience, long-suffering, kindness, and fruitfulness in labor.

“With these thoughts in mind, I wish to-night to speak a few words to you, and exhort you, even more signally in days that are to come, than you have in days that are past (for from my heart I can commend you in this respect), to carry out and ennoble that patience, that fidelity, and that churchly love, which, under great difficulties you have shown.

“My beloved, beware lest your intelligent judgment and conscientiousness in the cause of Christ, be absorbed in the feeling of personal love and sympathy for your elder brother. Beware lest you be drawn into a kind of clannish feeling of anxiety for him. I know that I have your love and sympathy, and I know that I am prayed for by you. That suffices me; but on your part it will be very bad for you to suffer this mere human feeling toward an individual to fill so large a place in your heart as that it may be said to fill your experience. You are a church of Christ set on a 540hill, and you cannot be hid; and your business here is to manifest Jesus Christ to the world in such a way as to win them to a nobler life; and you ought not to forget for what you are ordained. I have tried to set you an example. I have endeavored to keep free from such states of mind, and from such personality, either as regards you or myself, as should interfere with the teaching and the reception here of the fullest and most edifying truths of our common faith; and by the grace of God I have been enabled mainly to succeed in doing it. I doubt if any one hearing the sermons that have been preached here, with one or two exceptions, for the last five years, would from them suspect anything of that history through which this church has gone.

“So far as you are concerned, I do not say that it is possible for you not to converse about our difficulties in your families, and with each other; but you may do it too much; and, therefore, I wish to emphasize that your business as a church is not to take care of me, but to take care of and forward the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, your Head and Master. Do not, therefore, under the influence of amiable feelings, and warm sympathies, make the mistake of supposing that you are in a campaign of any sort, except that of rallying around about our appointed Leader. In the church, in your families, and in our mission schools, your business is to promote the teaching of Christ, for the awakening of men, and for the building up of all those who have undertaken the Christian life.

“In pursuing this course, it behooves you to remember that under such severe and prolonged trouble, God expects of you, not only that you will be constant and faithful in His service, but that you will grow richer, more spiritual, and in every way more like Christ. You have had, and are having, a better opportunity for fulfilling the disposition set forth in the Gospel, than is given to one church in a hundred. God has been and is dealing with you as with sons.

“We are on the eve of a memorable week. In 1874 a great council was called in Brooklyn to sit on our affairs, in which we were not to participate; now we have called a council to act upon our own affairs, and in this we must needs participate; and there are one or two things that I wish to say to you.

“First, you that receive the brethren into your households, ought to set up in your hearts a sentiment of honor that shall 541have no downfall nor intermission. Those gentlemen that come to take part in this council come impartially. Their office is to hear, and to give such advice as the Lord may inspire in them, upon the facts that shall be presented. In some sense—not technically—they are as judges; and you must not attempt in your homes to influence them, nor by your sympathy and kindness in the least degree to beguile them from the fullest and fairest discharge of their duty. Even if their judgment should be adverse to your convictions and mine, nevertheless it is very plainly a matter of Christian honor that they should be in your families, without in the least being biassed by social influences.

“Secondly, when you shall attend the open meetings of the council (for it must needs be that largely the audience will be composed of members of this church and society), I beseech of you, by all that is honorable and by all that is gentlemanly, that there be, neither from the gallery nor from any other part of the house, first or last, the slightest exhibition either of approval or disapproval. I could wish that you might sit in your pews as if you were marble, though I know that your hearts are hot within you. That council ought to be able to sit in the midst of the congregation of this church and never hear a whisper nor feel a wave of influence exerted upon them. We called them that they might do their duty faithfully; and I trust that you will commend yourselves in their sight by the most absolute abstention from any expression of thought or feeling in their presence.

“In the third place, I beg of you, both now and when they shall have assembled, to bear them in your hearts in prayer, morning and night, before God.

“If you will pray more for men you will have less occasion to do anything else; and, in regard to this council, praying for them is a mode of exerting an influence upon them, which you may indulge in. Do you believe in God? Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? Do you believe in prayer? Do you not believe that it is in the power of God to descend into such a council, to bring a summer atmosphere into them and around them, and to lead them by the invisible hand of truth, of love, and of justice? Pray much for them.

“And in one last word let me say that while all this agitation is going on, while the papers are full of bickerings, full of fiery darts that fall like sparks from the smith’s forge, remember that 542your duty is in church work and in church life. So far as possible, throw these unpleasant things off from your mind; take care of your classes and schools; attend faithfully to your mission work; live sweeter and holier lives in the family; be better men and better Christians in the household; do not let too much of the storm whistle through the cracks and crevices of your experience—keep it out; live individually and collectively near to Christ, and He will take care of me and of you. As He has done in times past, so will He do, and more abundantly, in the future, to the joy of our hearts and to the honor of His own great name.”

In the interim between the calling of the council and its convening, the case of Mr. Bowen came up before the church. For several years past, the old stories, which were supposed to have originated with him, had been set in circulation again, and quite recently a card appeared in a Brooklyn paper, over the signature of Mr. Bowen’s son, in effect repeating these slanders. A committee of Plymouth Church waited upon Mr. Bowen, but he refused to admit or deny that he was the originator of the stories—refused to make any statement or do anything. Ultimately he sent a letter to the committee (at the same time publishing it in the newspapers) making charges against Mr. Beecher, but in effect refusing to substantiate them, because he had not time to look up his evidence; but offering to submit his charges to a confidential committee of three, provided he should not be called on to give names, and that the committee should report only their conclusions.

When this letter was read at a church meeting Mr. Beecher arose and said:

“I do not propose to argue this question to-night—it is not fit that I should do it. I only propose to say one or two words on the matter; and one is: if for the last fifteen years and more, Mr. Bowen has been in possession of such facts as he now alleges in his letter, that he has, and never has mentioned them to me, nor communicated them to any officer of this church, nor in anywise brought them to the knowledge of the church itself, he deserves to be expelled from the church for a violation of his covenant. If I am what he alleges me to be, and have been what he alleges I have been, and he knew it, and permitted it, without a word of warning to me or to this church, he has committed 543a crime against the church, and against morality; and if his allegation is not true, but is a lie, then he is guilty of one of the blackest crimes that ever emanated from the bottomless pit—and, before God, I pronounce the allegations that he has, made to be utterly false.

“Further let me say that when Mr. Bowen, being called upon to state what these facts are, and what are the proofs of them which he has in his possession, pleads that he is upon trial, and that he has not time to look them up, what are we to think of such a plea? He had time to write that letter, and to charge me with being a criminal before the public of this continent, and, having had time to represent me as a monster, and to publish that representation in the newspapers, now, when he is asked, ‘What is your evidence?’ he has not time to produce it! Ought not that to have been thought of before he made the charge public?

“I have another word to say, and that is in regard to the tribunal which he proposes—a tripartite committee, a committee composed of three persons—on condition that in their presence he may hide names, and that then their judgment be given out in adjudication of the question. Now, I say that no secrecy shall rest on this matter. I do not say that I would not in some respects be willing to go before such a committee, but this I say: Nothing on this subject shall be kept secret. If this matter is not explored to the bottom it shall be because my will is set aside. I do not propose that Mr. Bowen shall hide himself, nor will I permit anything to be hidden about me, by having the matter referred to any three gentlemen who shall only let out what they think. What they think will not satisfy you; what they think will not satisfy me; and since the allegations have been made public through the newspapers, and Mr. Bowen’s name is attached to them, he has got to face the facts, he has got to produce the evidence. And as for myself, I have only this to say: I pronounce all the insinuations and allegations he has made as false, and, with Almighty God and the judgment day before me, I arraign him as a slanderer and a liar.”

Mr. Bowen produced no evidence to sustain his charges, and the church subsequently voted that they could dispense with him.

On the 15th of February the council, the largest of its kind that had ever been convened in this country, met. Dr. Bacon 544was chosen moderator; ex-Governor Dingley, of Maine, and General Erastus N. Bates, assistant moderators.

While the questions presented to the council were principally as to church regularity, the sixth also opened up the question of the action and result of the Investigating Committee referred to, and, generally, the whole conduct of the church with reference to its pastor; this naturally led to questions being put to Mr. Beecher personally as to the policy he had followed respecting the scandal.

Both Mr. Beecher and the committee of the church invited the fullest questioning on any point that could be suggested; urged the council to invite Drs. Storrs and Budington to be present, to call Mrs. Moulton’s counsel, and to examine Mr. Bowen—all of which the council did, Drs. Storrs and Budington declining to attend.

For eight days—three sessions each day, morning, afternoon, and evening—Mr. Beecher and the committee stood as targets for the questions of the council.

We present some of Mr. Beecher’s replies, as throwing light upon himself, and his actions, during the origin and growth of the scandal.

To the question why he had remained silent during the earlier rumors set afloat by Bowen and Tilton, and did not demand an investigation, he said: “This was the reason. The relations which subsisted between me and my people were those of very strong personal affection. I know all of you must be very much beloved by those whom you attend in sickness, to whom you preach, and whose troubles and sorrows you console. My God has given me a sympathetic nature, ardent and loving. I attract friends to me, and usually I hold them. I was dear to very many; and it has been the honor, as it has been the glory, of my recollection, that I have been beloved by those, to be beloved by whom is itself enough witness and enough honor. And it was because, from various reasons, intimations were made pointing to one, and another, and another, that I saw that, if I were to rush recklessly out after every rumor of this kind, which came insidiously and circuitously, I should bring a torrent of publicity and reproach upon one, two, three, many persons; and the question with me was, not simply what I ought to do, but, ‘Will you, for your own vindication, bring on an investigation, and project into publicity those persons who have the rights, the sanctities, and 545the delicacies of the domestic circle around about them?’ And now you see, when the first of these rumors has been brought into public notice, how it has spread and gone, like a fire on a prairie, all over the United States; and you see just what I apprehended would be the case. Having connected with me, in my relations to public affairs, parties and discussions of many sorts, I knew that the connection with my name in one of these various matters, under the circumstances, would proclaim it throughout Christendom; and the question with me was: ‘Will you stand patiently for God to vindicate you from these suggestions, putting to shame those that accuse you falsely; or will you vindicate yourself by bringing sheeted publicity, and lurid investigation, on one, on two, or on scores?’ I chose the course of silence.”

In reply to another question:

“Now, I wish to hear the other part of the question, sir—whether I am willing that Dr. Storrs and Dr. Budington should state anything that they know—any facts? I should like to know how much longer a man need be at the focus of a solar microscope, with all the sun in the heavens concentrated upon him for six months, and everything that could be raked, from the North Pole to the South Pole, and round the earth forty times circuited, raked up and brought in, and be willing to have it raked up and brought in again? How much longer does a man want to have his willingness to have the truth come out, vindicated? If there is any man on earth that has anything to say—that he wants to say—if there is any man on earth that has anything to say to my detriment, I here and now challenge him to say it! I go further than that. If there be any angel of God, semi-prescient and omniscient, I challenge him to say aught. I go beyond that, and, in the name of our common Redeemer, and before Him who shall judge you and me, I challenge the truth from God Himself! And what is all this going to do? To-morrow morning it will be said in the local journals: ‘Well, Mr. Beecher—how rhetorically he managed the matter!’ And it will be put in the religious papers: ‘Oh! yes; that was a very plausible statement at the time, but—but—’ And I am in judgment between two devils, ‘But’ and ‘If.’ Nothing that I say is taken to be true, and I am put upon a perpetual trial of my veracity; although I am willing to be tried, I don’t disguise from myself, suppressing every sentiment of natural honor that pertains to a gentleman—I 546know perfectly well this whole process is a continuous trial and crucifixion of every sentiment of honor and every sensibility of my soul, and that I am questioned, and questioned, and questioned, and questioned, as I have been, through months and years, on the supposition that the truth has not been got out. And I suppose it will be so to the end of my life. I don’t look with any great hope for the result of this council. I don’t look for any hope from the result of any council or tribunal. I think there is hope in the grave, and beyond; but for me, I expect to walk with a clouded head, not understood, until I go to heaven, and that is not far off—that is not far away. And I am content to bear just that lot that my dear Lord puts on me. He knows what is best. I have accepted it. Though the natural man rebels once in a while and bubbles out, yet grace in the end puts it down. But I am content to walk so. All my sorrow is that the preciousness of the Gospel, which it is given to me to preach, is hindered somewhat by this trouble; but to work for Christ, and to save men, is my calling, and not to vindicate myself.”

Again, referring to the perverse malignity that had characterized his enemies: “I said, and now I repeat it, that this church and its pastor have been systematically, studiously pursued with perversions and what cannot be considered other than deliberate falsehoods. In some quarters, whatever has happened has been so uniformly twisted, as to indicate what I supposed to be the truth—namely, an organized movement to pervert everything and destroy that influence which I formerly had with the common people of America, and then to bring vexations, so many and so frequent, upon the church as to disintegrate its patience, and thus to leave me alone without anything. And I will say that the backbitings, the whisperings, the innuendoes, the studious shutting of the understanding to all fairness, when I make statements, and the opening it wide to all partisan misrepresentations, when those statements were reported otherwise, have been such as to open a new chapter in my mind of human experience, and to carry me far back towards the old doctrine of total depravity.”

In the course of one of the sessions the pastor of a Boston church, referring to the unjust rumor, current in certain quarters, that since the scandal had come out the church and its pastor had not brought out all the facts, that there were rumors of something yet unpublished, and that they were now unreasonably refusing 547to submit the matter before some new tribunal, expressed his surprise at hearing the statement of the committee, and wondered that Mr. Beecher and his church had not been better understood by the public. To this Mr. Beecher replied:

“Gentlemen, you won’t suspect me of any disrespect to you, but I want to put a home question to you. This church has been occupied in publishing to the world for the last three years, a statement of those facts that have set you perfectly aghast, as novel and wonderful. What are you going to do when the representatives of the morality and the intelligence of this nation won’t read a word that is published, of the results of the church investigation, and the court investigation, but, coming up after they have been published for months, yet are amazed at the simple statement of that, which has been in the newspapers and the court records, during all this time? Are we forced not only to forge wedges of intelligence, but use clubs to drive them into your heads? We have been doing everything that man could do, in opening, in publishing, and, as far as it took any definite shape, in meeting. But you cannot hunt a stench; you can an arrow, but a smell you can’t. And therefore these odorous beasts are going up and down the streets, casting some venom and some odor; we can’t spend the time of a Christian church for ever hunting these things. Am I to run after every rat in creation? Am I to run after every leech, and worm, and every venomous insect?

“You have a right to demand of us that we shall meet accusations when they come up responsibly stated. Did we not meet them the moment the ‘Bacon letter’ appeared? Within the time that was necessary to bring me back from the country and back to the city, did we not instantly meet them with a call for investigation in the church? Was not that investigation made with a proclamation to the world to bring in everything known? It was not zeal covering me, it was dissection, and when the investigation had been made it was published to the world. No sooner had it been completed than we all distributed ourselves in the country for rest. When we came back I went instantly to a civil court. That trial was noticed for action immediately on my return, and I continued for six months in that court-room, and every paper in the United States helped distribute the information of the facts that were then disclosed. In July or August the 548court adjourned and we went back into the country. We had scarcely come back again from the summer vacation, before we took the matter up again in regard to members of this church, and issued process upon them, and this process has been that which has filled, the whole time since, the newspapers and the clerical mind of the country. Where has been the time and space in which we could institute anything else? Have we not been busy? Or shall we stay up all night, and turn Sunday into a judicial day, and investigate somewhat more?

“I don’t know—as long as God knows, and my mother, how it is, I have come to about the state of mind that I don’t care for you or anybody else. Well, you know that is not so: I do care and I don’t, and I do again and then I don’t—just as I happen to feel. I am tired of you; I am tired of the world; I am tired of men that make newspapers, and men that read them; I am tired of a community that has not a particle of moral reaction. I am tired of an age which will permit the newspapers to be flooded, and to make themselves the common sewers of filth and scandal; I am tired of a community that can read them, and read them, and read them without revolting. I am tired of waiting for an honorable man that shall stand up at last, and say, in the name of honor and manhood, ‘This is outrageous!’

“And yet I am going to bear it, and I am going on preaching, and I am going to preach here, and when I am shut up here I don’t know where I shall preach; but I don’t believe that I shall live long after I have stopped preaching. But what I want is to do God’s work, and if it is necessary to have a reputation in Andover, or a reputation in Chicago, before I am to preach, I may as well stop at once. But my own feeling about it is this: I am entrusted with the tidings of salvation to dying men, and the first wish of my heart, is not my good name nor my reputation. Dear as they are to me for my children’s sake, and for the sake of my family, after all there is a Name that is better to me than mine, there is a Name above every other name—for my trouble has brought me very near to it, and the glory of Christ. God’s glory and God’s delicacy, and sweetness and love were never made so apparent to me, as since I have felt the need of them in other folks.

”... I will answer as regards any paper that is in the possession of any man, woman, or child on this continent, or on the 549sea, or on the land, and beyond the sea; anybody in heaven and anybody in hell, that has any document that I have ever written, or any information that touches me in any manner, I hereby give my permission to them to produce it, and I challenge them to produce it, and if it is anything that will throw light on me and inculpate me, I demand, by every consideration of honor, truth, and justice, that it be delivered now and here, or that for ever after they and everybody shall hold their peace.”

At another time, referring to the burden of expense in the civil trial alone:

“I think people look upon my being tried as if it was a game of battledore and shuttlecock, and as if being tried was nothing but being tossed through the air by two clever fellows, and as if I ought to like it. And any expression of preference of one tribunal over another, or any arithmetical expression of how many times I would like to be tried, is said to be covering up something or other. I would like to state to the brethren here that my expenses for the trial of six months, and expenses of living for the year, amounted to $118,000. I do not feel disposed to go through a great many more such trials, but I trust you won’t think it is because I want to cover anything up, unless it is my pockets. And if there is anybody who wishes to take my place in the matter, and will pay the expenses, I will give up most cheerfully and let them represent me. I ought to state further in regard to these expenses—I state it in love and honor to my dear friend Shearman—that he would not take one penny for the whole year’s service, and that, aside from serving freely without money and without price, he so absolutely abandoned his business, that his income was cut down nine-tenths or more of what he was accustomed to receive, and that, great as my expenses were, relatively, his were double mine, for the love-service which he performed during this time.”

On the 24th of February the “result of council was announced.”

In this the council sustained Plymouth Church on every point, at the same time recommending a few changes in its manual which it was thought might save complication in the future.^[14]

550The council further advised in its “result”:

“In view of the fact that the pastor of this church has demanded that his accusers be brought to face him, and has invited such investigation as this council may think desirable, for the peace and prosperity of the churches, and in order to protect Plymouth Church from further vexatious proceedings, this council advises this church to accept and empower a commission of five members, to be created by a committee of three, hereinafter specified, out of the twenty men hereinafter named; the duty of which commission shall be to receive and examine all charges against the pastor which they may regard as not already tried....

“We hold the pastor of this church, as we and all others are bound to hold him, innocent of the charges reported against him until substantiated by proof.” The time within which such charges should be preferred was limited to sixty days.

This tribunal was thereafter appointed, and waited a year. It is perhaps needless to say that no charges were preferred.

In the closing addresses of the council to the church the speakers expressed more freely the prevailing personal feeling.

We quote Dr. Wellman, the first speaker:

“I would not depreciate at all the intense interest with which many of us, strangers to the pastor, have looked upon him, and watched him, and heard him as he has appeared before us and addressed us. But while I say that, I must say, for one, that I watched with still keener interest the men associated with him, and who came upon this platform to present this case—the members of the Plymouth Church Investigating Committee. And why have I watched these men with such intense interest? Now, all men know the power of this man of God to persuade men; and some of us, who live far away, have been told again and again, that this pastor had such persuasive power, that he could manage all his men here, and make them believe anything and do anything, and therefore it did not follow that, because this great church and people were so loyal to their pastor, that he was an innocent and pure man. Now, your loyal and magnificent devotion to your pastor, is your praise all over this land and all over this world. We had not seen you; we did not know what kind of men were associated with this man of God; and it was possible, we thought, that they were weak men, who could be blinded and could be made to believe anything. I have watched these men, 551and I aver to-night that they are not men of feeble mind, and not men who would have an impure pastor here if they knew it, and not men to be managed by any pastor; and it has been the joy of my heart to find that such men have been associated, during these years of your darkness and sorrow, with this man of God.

“It has been said that this pastor is managing this council. Somehow people all over the world have great confidence in the managing power of this man. So far as I can see, he is the very last man to manage anybody; and as to his managing this council, I wish to say here and now, once for all, and I wish it to go through you to all the world, that he has managed us—just as that man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and robbed, and stripped, and wounded and thrown aside and left half-dead, managed that other man who came to his distress and bent over him and poured oil upon his wounds and dressed them, and took him up and brought him to the inn and cared for him. So this man has managed us, and in no other way. I had no acquaintance with him; I never spoke to him until the last week; but, coming here, I have been greatly touched—indeed, nothing has touched me more than the manner in which this pastor has laid bare his heart to us, and asked us to search him through and through, his heart and his life, and tell him if there be anything wrong in him or in what he has done. He has done this again and again, before the council, and it has made me feel, for one, that there was no need of searching such a man. I have noticed repeatedly, during the presentation of this case, that the pastor of this church seemed to be living two kinds of lives, one a sad one, and the other a life of earnest duty. Underneath his work and his addresses to us, there came out every now and then a sad undertone, as if he felt that he must live and toil for all the rest of his life, under this dark cloud of suspicion and constant misrepresentation, and with these constant dagger-rents in his heart. Now, I do not believe that he is to live the rest of his life under this cloud and this burden of trouble. Ever since this council was by itself, I have seen out of all this darkness a bright morning coming, and never has that morning seemed so near and so close as it does to-night.”

And from the address of Dr. Sturtevant, president of Illinois College:

552“What now are we to expect? What is to be the result of this? This: Brother Beecher and his church are to be assured from this hour that they have our confidence. He is to be regarded as innocent until charges of guilt have been tabled and substantiated—not floating rumors, not the slime of the crawling serpent, but charges clear, definite, with all needed specifications of names and dates and witnesses, charges behind which there stands a responsible endorser; and while he stands thus, we extend to him the hand of our hearty fellowship, and entire confidence, until those charges are tabled and established. That confidence begins here and now; and it enables him to say, and his people to say: ‘All these rumors, these innuendoes, these floating stories that circulate through the press, and through the ten thousand channels in which rumor flows, are worthy of no account until they are backed by responsible men, who are willing to face that commission, and to attempt to prove those charges before that commission; and if men continue to rail and continue to tell horrible stories of what they know, how it was ten years ago, and seven years ago, and five years ago, etc., and what this man said and what that woman said—if they continue to say such things, believe them not. They are just as respectable as Shimei was, when he went along the hill and cursed David.’”

From parts of Mr. Beecher’s address to the council at the close, after the “result” had been announced, we get a clearer insight of his feelings, and of his life during these troublesome times, than from most anything else that he has uttered:

“It has come to pass that for so many years I have read of myself and heard of myself, that I have ceased in some moods to have any actual self, and am projected as an idea before my own mind. And if I shall therefore speak somewhat freely, after the manner of men, about myself, I wish you to consider it a part of those metaphysics which Dr. Porter says are very bad. I have often read as if I were reading in a novel about the bad hero, and waked up from the dream and grimly laughed as I asked myself: ‘Is it me that they mean? Is it possible for a man to live as long as I have, and as openly, and to have acted upon so large a theatre, and been agitated by such world-shaking events, and be so utterly misconceived?’ I have had the reputation of being a frank man. But it may be true that I am a man of very cautious 553speech, and may therefore sometimes not have expressed myself intelligently, though at other times I have had the reputation of being able to make myself understood! Nevertheless it has come to pass that I supposed myself to have been more thoroughly canvassed, and construed in no very enviable light, than it has befallen to any of my contemporaries. I am very sorry that it should be so. I have no love of being a hero, and I have still less of being such a hero as I have been made to be. I tell you that to hear men talking whether I am or am not guilty makes the very mother-thought shiver within me. For I have sensibility—I am open to the keenest sense of truth and purity, and honor and right; and to be held before a jury, and to sit six long months, and to have rained upon me perjury and professional abuse, and to feel that over the whole broad extent of this land, I was the focal point on which journalism was expending itself, and that, too, not as to whether I was Republican or Democrat, not whether I was orthodox or heterodox, not whether this or that system expounded was rightly held, but whether I was an ineffable culprit! I have not been hunted as an eagle is hunted; I have not been pursued as a lion is pursued; I have not been pursued even as wolves and foxes. I have been pursued as if I were a maggot in a rotten corpse. And do you suppose that it is in human nature to go through that, through months and through years, and not feel it? And yet, if it please God, who has enabled me to go through the desert and the Red Sea, that I should go on, God is my judge, that I am both willing and I am able to go on again another five years; for I can do all things, Christ strengthening me, and the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me never so much as now.

“At some time it may be in my power to defend myself on every count and charge. It may be in my power, at some time, with dates and circumstances to expound the reason of my conduct. I am the child of a noble mother and of a noble father, and I was brought up in an austere morality and in a pure and unblemished household, with a most reverent honor for truth, for duty, for love. And to me has been given a nature for which, whether it be prudent or whether it be not, I am not questionable. When they rebuke the vine for throwing out tendrils and holding on to anything that is next to it, whether it be homely or handsome, whether it be dry or full of sap, then they may rebuke 554me. When you shall find a heart to rebuke the twining morning-glory, or any other plant that holds on to that which is next to it, you may rebuke me for misplaced confidence; you may rebuke me for loving where I should not love. It is not my choice; it is my necessity. And I have loved on the right and on the left, here and there, and it is my joy, that to-day I am not ashamed of it. I am glad of it, and if I had my life to live over again, and were to choose between a cold caution, calculating every step, without trust and confidence in man, I would, with all its liabilities, choose to be generous, to be magnanimous, and to be trustful, and to lean though some should step aside and let me fall to the ground. And let me say further that I was brought up in a household where the name of woman was only next to the name of saint, and with good reason I always thought it should stand there. The memory of my mother has been to me, what the Virgin Mary has been to a devotee of the Roman Church. She has been part and parcel of my upper life—a star whose parallax I could not take, but nevertheless, shining from afar, she has been the light that lit me easier into the thought of the invisible and the presence of the Divine. My sisters I need not speak of. My associations have been with women who have left upon my mind an indelible impression of honor, of reverence, and of affection; and all that I have gone through, and all that I have suffered at the hands of those that are of another school, has not changed, nor in the slightest degree blurred, the sense that I have of the dignity and the sacredness and the beauty of womanhood. And when I have stood upon the threshold of what seemed to me—knowing the secret elements that were in it, and how a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand might roll up and cover the whole heaven—when I have stood and looked out upon what might come, what misery might be, I have said, and God knows the sincerity and the depth of it, ‘It is better for me—if it be possible—it is better for me to stand, and be misunderstood than that there should be suffering over so wide a circle,’ as I believed there would be. And that there have been so many heart-aches, that there have been so many, whose faces I never saw, that have been bathed in tears, that there has been even the eclipse of faith that has been mentioned in many, only shows how much would have been saved to humanity, if it had been possible that that policy of suffocating a domestic trouble, 555and keeping it in the origin of it, had been followed out and honorably observed. The fire, that at the first is only so much that you can stamp it out, may, by fanning winds or reckless hands, be spread beyond your reach, and the whole city deluged with flame, the whole prairie be sheeted with fire. That which, in its beginning, seems quite manageable, it seems to me policy not only, but duty, to suppress and maintain in its seclusion; for if it bursts out it will know no bounds and no termination. The endeavor I do not regret; the ill success of it I do.

“But having gone through it all, my only question—that is, my only deepest question—is, Has it wrenched you from the foundations of a true manhood? Do you believe in God? Do you trust in the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you live by the communications of the Holy Ghost? Is the higher part of your nature in commerce with God? I look around among men and I say, Has it made you hating? Has it made you jealous? Has it made you a misanthropist or a misogynist? Are you sound—sound in your chest, sound in your heart? Are you a man? Do you love men? Do you trust men? Do you honor women? Do you trust them? Are you willing to labor for them? Are you willing to suffer for them? I think I may say, without any fear, I do believe that I live in the Spirit of God and very near to Him, and in regard to my feelings toward mankind there does not live the man on the face of this earth that I would harm if I had him in my power. There is not that human creature—I know it—there is not that human creature that lives, that I would not rather help than hurt. There is not that creature that lives for whom I would not bear suffering, if I could save him from greater suffering. I have tried to live in the spirit of Christ, who wrought our joy by His sorrow, who saved us by sacrificing Himself. I have endeavored to so live. And now let me say further than this, that while I make these asseverations of the honesty of my intent, and while I mean to convey, in the strongest language, my consciousness of innocence and rectitude, and honor and purity, I do not mean to say that I have always been wise, and still less that I should advise another to attempt to walk the path that I have walked, or that I have always kept my temper, or that I have always restrained my tongue. These, which I will not call infirmities, if you please to call them wrongs or sins—name them yourselves, and I will still 556excel you in condemning, in myself, anything that has been less than the straight line of sweetness, and of meekness, and of gentleness. I do condemn myself often that I am rash, that in an over-heat I said things I ought not to have said, and I am the more concerned, when I learn that these words are not merely a rhetorical fault, nor regarded simply as a blur upon me, but that they go like poisoned arrows and afflict other hearts; and if there is any word that I have said, that has hurt the pastors of near churches, or churches afar off, I would to God that I could so utterly recall it, that they should never think of it again; and I would be the first of all to humble myself before them, and crave that pardon of them, which I have asked before of God. And if that which I have said or done is a hindrance to a full reconciliation, I would to God that all the waters of the Jordan might wash it out from every memory. I disown it and take it all back, and beseech of you, as I beseech of every other one, to remember of me, only those things that are like the Lord Jesus Christ, and that by His grace I have been enabled to do rightly. I am discharged of all jealousy. I have no pride that hinders me from saying these things to you, and giving you leave to give to them the utmost latitude in their application.

“Allusion has been made to sadness on my part, of which no man may know. For whatever may be the range of a man’s outward life, there is a world within, unknown to any but God, and the most vital part of every man’s life, is that which is within the crystal cave of his own silence and secrecy; and of that I do not propose to speak any further than this—that I have often felt that my life had come very near to its end. I live in the shadow of that feeling every day. At some hour or other of every day, it seems to me as though but a hand’s breadth was between me and the New Jerusalem. It is not either, necessarily a desire for dying nor an expectation of dying; it is a sentiment. And I live very much in that habit; not altogether a painful one—often far from it. But this I have felt in looking back in those moments upon my past life—I have felt a great joy that no man can take it from me. I lived when the reformation of intemperance first began, and I gave great time and strength to recover my countrymen from the vice. I began early my career, when there were few to plead for the liberty of the slave. I have lived in a minority all my days, contesting for the right and for liberty. I 557had the privilege of living through that glorious revolutionary epoch of our time, when the political economy, and the politics, and the constitutional elements of our land were regenerated. Few men have ever had such a chance, or the health, or the opportunity to put in labor, in a field so rich in future results. No man can take it from me that I have loved my country and that I have labored for her. No man can take it from me that I have loved the Church of Jesus Christ and that I have labored for it. No man can take it from me that I have loved my kind without caste or distinction. No man can take it from me! Now, I do not care for my reputation after I am dead and gone. That kind of love of reputation I never had, but there is something that is to me as sweet as the bells of heaven. If I have been able to inject into the literature of my time a truly sweet and Christian spirit; if I have been able to clothe nature so that children and women and grown people will have associations with trees and clouds, with the ground, with all the processes of annual resuscitation; if I have been able to clothe them with religious associations, so that the heavens declare again the glory of God and the earth His handiwork; if I have put into words that which will cheer the sick and the poor, that will inspire the young, and that will go on working after I am dead—this has been a very sustaining and a very comforting thought to me. There is my joy for posterity—that when by and by the clouds are all gone, when by and by the truth is as much known as the earth will ever know truth, that which I have done will stand, that which I am God will know, and cause it to stand for ever and ever.”

We give some extracts from his diary, and from letters written near this time, which show how he looked upon the past few years:

“I have never read or heard of an instance where a pastor was called to carry forward a great church under such a pressure as I have. Whatever is deepest, tenderest, and best in manhood has been crucified with a prolonged crucifixion. I have seen the poisonous malaria, affecting my reputation in the whole community where I have dwelt for so many years with an unblemished character. I have seen false brethren silently bringing to bear upon me the odium of the most damaging suspicions. I have seen them secretly taking counsel together, tampering with the fidelity of the members of Plymouth Church, and seducing my personal friends, 558violating, under false pretences, ecclesiastical good neighborhood, calling councils to interfere with the peace and harmony of Plymouth Church, and thus spreading a local scandal and a ruinous suspicion over, literally, the wide world. From this persecution among false brethren the trouble broke out into public and prolonged trial by the newspapers of the country.

“With a few honorable exceptions, the religious press was quick to believe evil and to confirm suspicion, and, with a few equally honorable exceptions, the secular press joined my adversaries.

“I was next tried by my own church, and after a minute research, and upon grounds never controverted or undermined, I was acquitted and justified. For six months thereafter I was subjected to the disgrace of sitting before a court of justice and having every atom of evidence admitted that money and malice could bring together. And after this long and weary trial the jury refused to grant to my enemy the verdict which he sought; whereupon my ministerial neighbors, reversing the fact that the jury refused him damages, reported that I was not cleared—as if I had gone into court voluntarily, sought a verdict, and lost my suit.

“Following the civil trial, these insidious enemies commenced a course of vexatious attempts to call councils, and so to weary the patience of the Plymouth people.

“To meet this vexatious proceeding the church called the largest council ever convened upon this continent. Its members came almost to a man, with doubting hearts, but went away with enthusiastic joy, having justified the church and justified its pastor. But, perceiving the venomous spirit that disguised itself under pretence of anxiety for ecclesiastical regularity, the Great Council provided a court to sit and act when the council should be dissolved—a court composed of legal men, than whom none more impartial, just, and pure were ever called to sit upon the bench. No one dared to bring charges, though the court waited for years.

“In this long and dreadful season it would be difficult to say which suffered most intensely, the church or its pastor.

“No one will ever know the nervous strain required to bear this terrible pressure, to maintain a Christian spirit, to carry on my pulpit duties, and to encourage and sustain the spirit of the church.”

“Nov. 12, Friday morning.—For several years I have been passing through severe trials on account of the troubles in the Tilton family. This has taken hold upon the church, personal friends, family, newspapers, civil courts, ecclesiastical bodies, etc. I have thus been like a lamb, not before her shearers, but before a fire, every stick of which has had enough heat in it to consume one’s peace and comfort. In all this six years I have laid down for myself the strictest adherence to Christian principles, in all my feelings toward each person or party concerned, and upon my conduct in every part of the perplexing and exhausting struggle for life—for my life is aimed at, and the struggle is for life, in every sense in which life is a blessing.”

“Tuesday, Nov. 23, 1875.—H——— called from Missionary Association to inquire what I thought of their asking Dr. Storrs to speak at opening of Fisk University at Nashville. Replied, No reason against, unless they thought that just at this time, when he heads and inspires a movement against Plymouth Church and me. But that they, and not I, should determine.

“In myself there are two thoughts: (1) Should I give help to an enemy who will use it for my harm? and (2), and a better one, Ought I to take any care or notice of the ascent or descent in influence of one not friendly? Is it not better to go on doing duty and leave wholly to the Over-ruler the disposition of affairs?

“‘Fret not thyself because of evil-doers.’”

Shortly after the council had adjourned, and on the 27th of February, 1876, Dr. Leonard Bacon, in that spirit of brotherly love that filled the council at its close, wrote to Mr. Beecher:

“... ‘A brother offended,’ whether Storrs (R. S.) or Budington, ‘is harder to be won than a strong city.’ But is it not possible for you (God helping you) to win Brother Storrs, and then to win Budington also?

“Of course you are an innocent man, grievously calumniated, pierced through and through with arrows, like St. Sebastian. You feel that the position of those two brethren in relation to you is unbrotherly and unkind. You complain (and, I will say, reasonably) that neither of them came to you in the beginning of these troubles, or has come to you at any later time, with a 560request for explanation or with offers of sympathy and assistance. They, on the other hand, think that you have withheld your confidence and have stood aloof from them.... Is it not possible for you to win Storrs?... You will not win him by waiting till he shall come to you.... What, then, would be the effect on Brooklyn, on our country, on ‘English-speaking Christianity,’ if it should be announced that you three are ‘brothers reconciled’? Have I proposed an impracticable thing? Am I imagining an impossible result? If so, alas!...”

To this Mr. Beecher replied:

562“I have thought that any movement with hope of success must come from within his own church. But there is an undeveloped party on each side.

“On the whole, I have come to about this:

“That the families of the two churches should hold on to each other more firmly than ever before, and on both sides refuse to be separated.

“Then, as time goes on and the scandal gives place to other things in the public mind, occasions or influences which we do not now command may arise in God’s good providence, and a way be opened.

“I have often and often thought that if it were God’s will that I might die, a great stumbling-block would be taken away, and health would come out of my grave to the ailing hearts about me.

“And why not?

“I have lived long, and no one ever had leave to live in an age of such opportunities, as those who have had their prime in the past thirty years. One ought not to be greedy of years.”

The hope in which the Great Council was called was realized. The pastors and delegates, called from twenty-one States, returning to their homes, became centres of a noble, generous influence, correcting false impressions, setting doubts at rest, renewing again the old love and confidence.

It is true that here and there, especially in certain theological centres, there were those whose partisan zeal, jealous malice, or even personal hatred would not let them rest content with the deliverance; who would rather have kept Christendom deluged with the vile mess than that Mr. Beecher should stand cleared and justified.

But the great serpent was dead; only its tail wiggled and stirred a little dust for a short time. After a little even that lay quiet.

The clouds were dissipating, the sky was clearing, and soon the sun shone with its former brightness, giving comfort, light, and life to many thousands.

The conspiracy had failed. Where to-day are the conspirators?^[15]

Rest and renewed Activity—Lecturing Tours—Resignation from the Congregational Association—Boston Criticisms.

Very shortly after Mr. Beecher settled in Brooklyn he began working in a somewhat different and larger parish than the one included in his church. At first in the more immediate vicinity of New York, then gradually widening and enlarging his circuit, he spent no small portion of the week, during the winter months, in lecturing. He sought to elevate the public morals, to educate public sentiment along the line of integrity and morality. While his lectures were full of the humorous, alive with bright poetic thoughts, there was always a purpose sought in each and this always seemed essential to the development of his best efforts. No lecture was ever delivered by him that some of his audience did not go home strengthened and encouraged in their purposes of right living, or awakened to begin a better life. They were week-day sermons on practical morals. His field had gradually broadened, until by 1870 it included all of the Northern States east of the Mississippi River. From these lectures he derived no inconsiderable income, which was expended with no mean hand for charity, on friends, and the gratification of his artistic and literary tastes.

With the outbreak of the Tilton conspiracy, and the various vexatious proceedings incidental to and in aid thereof, he naturally found too much employment at home, and too great a strain on mind and body, to leave either strength, leisure, or inclination for lecturing. With the close of the Great Council came comparative peace, and in the winter following he resumed his regular lecturing. For this there were several reasons.

The mental and nervous wear and tear of the past five or six years had been terrible. As we have seen, he had many times been brought to the verge of complete prostration, which he feared might end in death or paralysis.

It was imperative that he should get some relief from this 565strain. With him rest did not mean idleness, but rather activity in a different direction, often greater than the work which had fatigued him. Such a remedy he found in lecturing.

Then it was necessary to make good the great expenditure of money entailed upon him. The “trial year” alone had cost him over $118,000, and, notwithstanding the loving generosity of his people had raised his salary for that year to $100,000, he found himself heavily in debt. Lecturing afforded the means of remedying this difficulty.

Another reason strenuously urged by friends, was that, to meet and talk with the many thousands scattered over the land, who had so long loved and trusted him, would greatly aid in scattering the clouds that had been so long lowering; that it would be a source of strength and comfort to them, and greatly benefit him. A series of lecture-tours followed during the next two or three years, extending through the New England States, West, Southwest, and South, the results of which fully justified every reason for this undertaking.

Then for the first time he realized how many friends he had. It is true that when the sky was darkest he received many hundreds of letters from friends and strangers expressing unabated confidence and sympathy. Grateful and comforting as these were to him, they did not so fully reveal to him the hold that he had on the hearts of the American people as the demonstrations that greeted him on these lecture-trips.

What these demonstrations were we can gain some idea from his letters home, brief and hasty sketches, written at odd intervals:

“Next Boston. Temple full. Received me with prolonged clapping.... Preached Sunday A.M. for ———. Had great liberty, and, as he says, swept everything.... At night in Boston for ———. Ten thousand people couldn’t get in. Shook hands with whole audiences. Papers next morning with kind notices. Went to Congregational ministers’ meeting on Monday morning. Cheered and clapped when I entered. After paper for day was finished it was moved that I address the meeting. I did so, and closed with prayer. All wept, and it broke up like a revival meeting. D———, S———, A———,^[16] etc., present; did not shake 566hands, but scores of others did.... I learn that the Andover students have come back three to one against S———. They intend asking me over to-morrow morning to talk to them....”

“I preached yesterday in St. Paul (Minn.) I returned early this morning to meet the clergy of this city in Stimpson’s study, about twenty-five, of all churches, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregational, Baptist, Lutheran, Free-Will Baptist, etc. Two hours, in which they questioned me about my views on doctrines, sermon-making, preaching, etc., etc., and at close I prayed with them. Royal time. They were more than cordial. Excitement for to-night’s lecture even greater than for that of Friday. Dr. Post, of St. Louis, writes to me to fill his pulpit, also the other Congregational minister; while the very papers that used, a year or two ago, to abuse me, are demanding that the largest hall or theatre shall be taken, so that the common people can get in.”

“The sense of spring has accompanied me all the way. I am now in the middle of my third week—nearly half through. Laus Deo. Everywhere the same kindness, affection, and enthusiasm. Madison is the capital of this State, and the Speaker and members of the Legislature have just sent a committee requesting me to open the house with prayer.... In short, the whole slander is burned over out here, like a prairie or an old corn-field, and will never lift itself again.”

“I had not expected a large audience, but I had it. I expected but few of the upper class of people, but I had the best of the city; even Watterson, of the Courier-Journal, that had always vilely blackguarded me, sent for tickets for himself, family, and his father. I was in good trim, and for nearly two hours I avenged myself upon that audience. The enthusiasm was complete. Every one said that I had conquered Louisville, and so I am enjoying the fruits of revenge! I had an uncommonly successful trip. In Pittsburgh there was a grand audience—all the ministers from far and near. It was said that there were a hundred in the audience.”

“All my life long I have had good, warm friends, but I never knew until recently what friendship was outside of those of my own immediate circle. The unmistakable enthusiasm, the love and eagerness, the lingering and the longing, have been such as to fill my cup full.

“I have felt, time and again, that that which I have had of 567trouble I have bought at a cheap rate; the trouble has been but a small price to pay for a lodgment in the hearts of the best men, the best women, and the children. I have found that those whose love is deepest and warmest represent families who look at everything in the world from the standpoint of the household—who judge of preaching, of ethics, and of methods by the relation which they bear to the bringing up of the young, and to the founding and maintaining of Christian homes. That part of the community who live in the household, and honor it, I had almost said, were universally my most dear and cordial friends.”

From this time on until his death he was more or less in the lecture-field every year.

Another period of restful calm sets in, during which he devoted himself, comparatively undisturbed, to his duties in the pulpit, the editorial chair of the Christian Union, and the lecture-field.

During this period of quiet he made those definite announcements of his beliefs that so much disturbed many of his theological brethren, notably his sermon on the “Background of Mystery,” in which he discussed that mysterious question of future punishment; and a little later the series since published under the title of “Evolution and Religion,” discussing the application of the theory of evolution to religious beliefs.^[17] Notwithstanding many of the most eminent of the American and English clergy had both entertained and expressed similar views, their exposition by Mr. Beecher, as usual, called forth much criticism, more or less severe according to the theological bent of the critic, but also much friendly comment.

He was at this time a member of “The Congregational Association,” composed of Congregational clergymen of New York and Brooklyn. Feeling that many of his brethren did not agree with his views, and that yet they might be held to some extent responsible for his beliefs, he determined to resign from the Association.

At the meeting October 13, 1882, he had been assigned for discussion the topic of “Spiritual Barbarism.” After discussing the theological beliefs which he regarded as appropriately 568coming under that expression, he went on to give a full declaration of his personal beliefs, and then at the close stated:

“I have reason to believe that a great many of the brethren of the Congregational faith would speak more than disapproval, and that many even in the Association to which I belong feel as though they could not bear the burden of responsibility of being supposed to tolerate the views I have held and taught; and it is on this account that I, as a man of honor and a Christian gentleman, cannot afford to lay on anybody the responsibility of my views. I cannot afford especially to put them in such a position that they are obliged to defend me. I cannot make them responsible in any way, and therefore I now here, and in the greatest love and sympathy, lay down my membership of this Association and go forth—not to be separated from you. I shall be nearer to you than if I should be in ecclesiastical relation. I will work for you, I will lecture for you, I will personally do everything I can for you. I will even attend these meetings as a spectator with you. I will devote my whole life to the Congregational churches and their interests, as well as to all other churches of Christ Jesus. I am not going out into the cold. I am not going out into another sect. I am not going away from you in any spirit of disgust. I never was in warmer personal sympathy with every one of you than I am now; but I lay down the responsibility that you have borne for me—I take it off from you and put it on myself. And now you can say, ‘He is a member of the Congregational Church, but he has relieved his brethren of all responsibility whatever for his teachings.’ That you are perfectly free to do. With thanks for your great kindness, and with thanks to God for the life which we have had here together, I am now no longer a member of the Congregational Association of New York and Brooklyn, but with you a member of the body of Christ Jesus, in full fellowship with you in the matter of faith and love and hope.”

He was earnestly urged to reconsider his resignation. He felt it to be his duty to adhere to the determination expressed. The Association unanimously passed the following resolution expressive of their feelings:

“Resolved, That the members of the New York and Brooklyn Association receive the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher’s resignation of his membership in this body with very deep pain and regret. 569We cannot fail to recognize the generous magnanimity which has led him to volunteer this action, lest he should seem even indirectly to make his brethren responsible before the public for the support of philosophical and theological doctrines wherein he is popularly supposed to differ essentially with those who hold the established and current evangelical faith. His full and proffered exposition of doctrinal views that he has made at this meeting indicates the propriety of his continued membership in this or any other Congregational Association. We hereby declare our desire that he may see his way clear to reconsider and withdraw it. We desire to place on record as the result of a long and intimate acquaintance with Mr. Beecher, and a familiar observation of the results of his life, as well as his preaching and pastoral work, that we cherish for him an ever-growing personal attachment as a brother beloved, and a deepening sense of his worth as a Christian minister. We cannot now contemplate the possibility of his future absence from our meetings without a depressing sense of the loss we are to suffer, and unitedly pledge the hearts of the Association to him, and express the hope that the day for his return may soon come.”

Of course much comment followed this step—perhaps more marked among some of the Boston clergy than elsewhere—and in its turn drew from Mr. Beecher several characteristic letters. One to a near friend:

“Don’t be scared because Boston has boiled over; it has not put the fire out.

“It is amusing to see the pains taken to prove that I am of no account, dead, useless, a castaway. I know that I am dead. I knew it twenty years ago; I have been certified of the fact every year since. I have no influence—I never had, cannot have; a hundred fluttering ministers are eager to say so before the world! Well, what of it? The wild-fowl return from the north as usual, winter comes on, the spring will come in its season, birds and flowers—indeed, it does seem to me that Nature cares nothing at all for all this squabbling of men! I am astonished at Nature!...”

Another in reply to an invitation to answer his critics through the columns of the Boston Traveller:

“I thank you for the letter and paper. I have read the somewhat large expressions of these many and excellent men in 570regard to my orthodoxy, consistency, influence, and general merit, without wishing for a moment to reply, as you kindly request me.

“When a dead man is lying on the dissecting-table under the hands of experts, it would be unbecoming in him to rise up suddenly and discuss with his surgeons the propriety of their methods and the truth of results. It is not often that one can see himself as others see him, and especially as Boston sees him, and, more than all, as Boston clergymen see him. I am reduced to pulp, but, thank Heaven! not to ashes. When you suggest a reply to these, I am sure you can have no conception of the subdued and enlightened state of my mind. I am bent on improvement. Laying aside all my old notions of my beliefs and of my standing, I am carefully putting together the real man that I now am taught that I am. When I get my new personal identity together and in working shape, I intend to study theology somewhere, though in my present confusion I cannot yet say whether I shall study at Andover or Boston; New Haven is nearer, but Dr. Smythe has been settled there, and I fear laxity of doctrine in his neighborhood. Princeton is not far to the south of me, but Dr. McCosh is a Christian evolutionist, and it would be folly, after what I have suffered, to come under the malarial influence of that philosophy. On the whole, I incline to study at Park Street. But wherever I may go I am determined before I die to find a theology which will pass muster at Bangor, at Andover, at Cambridge, at New Haven, at Princeton, at Alleghany, at Oberlin, at Chicago, and at Park Street.

“Then I shall willingly die.”

Attacking Corrupt Judges—Interest in Political Questions—Advocating Arthur’s Renomination—Opposing Blaine—Supporting Cleveland—Campaign of 1884—After the Battle.

It had always been Mr. Beecher’s belief that a Christian gentleman should be a good citizen, and that being a good citizen involved some responsibility in securing and enforcing righteous laws, in electing honest men, and defeating the corrupt and unworthy. With this belief his whole life was consistent. In his early ministry we find him fighting corruption, intoxication, and slavery, the then three great public evils. Later he stood as one of the sponsors to the Republican party. In 1856 he entered with all his force in the Fremont campaign, and in 1860 stumped the Middle and New England States for Lincoln. The overthrow of slavery was his objective point—the one great public evil which at that time overtopped all others.

When, in 1864, Lincoln ran for re-election, he spared no effort to secure it.

And as he thought that whatever pertained to the duties of a Christian man might properly be discussed in the pulpit, he did not hesitate, during those war times, when the national existence was threatened, to advocate the cause of the nation and the cause of liberty from his pulpit; at one time, just before the election of 1864, devoting his evening sermon for the six preceding weeks exclusively to the nation’s cause.

We remember vividly the great throngs that packed the church for two hours before the sermon, many getting entrance through the side windows, while the street contained as many more trying in vain to even reach the open doors.

We shall never forget the thrills of excitement that ran through the audience under the influence of Mr. Beecher’s impassioned eloquence. He was thoroughly aroused, and seemed to impart much of the intensity of his own feelings to his audience. He felt that to defeat Lincoln then meant to throw away 572all that had been obtained by such a sacrifice of men and money.

We are not surprised, then, in 1868-69—at the time when the flood of corruption had deluged New York city, reaching even to the judges on the bench—that his voice was raised in continuous protest against that disgraceful state of affairs, calling on all good men to unite and purge the city of its corruption. The attack from Plymouth pulpit upon the corrupt judiciary, especially, was unsparing and continuous, sometimes through whole sermons and sometimes incidentally.

The times were in desperate need of some bold moral surgery, for it would be hard to imagine a worse condition in the public administration—in well nigh every department and branch—than that which existed from 1867 to 1871. The infamous Tweed had assumed virtually the dictatorship, and impudently wanted to know of the people, “What are you going to do about it?” A query which was fully answered a few years later. But the climax was reached in the almost utter corruption of the bench. There were some honest judges in New York then, but they suffered from the same imputation that, in more modern times, falls upon any man who has had the misfortune to have been elected an alderman of the same city. Friends of some of the judges were rash enough to attempt an answer through the public press to Mr. Beecher’s attack. But this only furnished the text for a series of more terrible denunciations in reply, which led to a very hasty muzzling of the rash defenders of the bench. A public discussion, even in those days of public apathy and demoralization, was the last thing that was wished by the corruptionists whom he was attacking.

To a member of the federal bench who wrote him, protesting that there were some honest judges who would be injured by Mr. Beecher’s strictures, he replied:

“... Of the fourteen (elective) judges of New York there are not over five who are not known to be corrupt—i. e., who do not employ their office for the promotion of their private interests at the expense of the public good—and hardly one of the whole fourteen who is not guilty of flagrant nepotism.

“Now, if clergymen were violating the vows of their calling in half that proportion they would have no right to complain, if some judge declared ‘the clergy were corrupt,’ and the judges 573have no just reason of complaint, when a clergymen declares the courts of New York to be corrupt, and that their judges ‘stink’ (asking pardon of your sensibility).

“If this allegation in so broad a form involves the innocent along with the guilty, it is because such is the law of social liability....

“If the honorable men who are alive to the purity of the judicial reputation can find no way of making a public and recognized distinction between themselves and their unworthy companions, they should not be surprised if their own names are clouded, too.

“In regard to yourself, personally, I have never heard a whisper of dishonor, ... and if you do not receive the full meed of your desert, is it not because you belong to a profession which, in New York City, is earning itself an odious reputation?

“I wish to arouse a conscience in the community, outside of courts, which will compel those judges who are pure, and who value their reputation, to manifest their repugnance at corruption. I do not mean to pause....

“I am obliged to you for the frankness of your letter, and none the less because I entirely disagree with your judgment.

“You fear that such indiscriminate censure will ruin the influence of law and courts, and demoralize society.

“Bad laws and bad judges demoralize society, and not the exposure of them. Religion was in no danger when our Master denounced the priesthood of the temple, among whom, as with judges, there were many devout and pure men. He expressed, as I do, the opinion of society outside of the profession. The exposure was a step toward reformation.”

How far his persistent denunciation stimulated and awakened the public conscience and hastened the final overthrow of that colossal reign of corruption, of course no man can say. But the attention and excitement aroused thereby indicated that his part in that strife was no insignificant one.

In his own city he took an active part in the local elections, working earnestly for the public welfare, striving to secure the election of those men who would best administer the local government.

In the earlier years of the Republican party questions vitally affecting the welfare of the nation, and even its very existence, 574were before the people. And on these the Republican party maintained those principles, which he believed were essential to the maintenance of the nation. He threw his entire strength and influence with that party, sparing nothing. After the war had determined the questions of secession and slavery, and the reconstruction period had past and a sound financial policy been established, he noticed with no little disturbance the insidious growth of corrupting influences in various branches of the government, and the gradually increasing prominence and influence in the party’s councils of men who did not, in his opinion, stand for the highest principles of personal and political honesty. So far as he could he sought to counteract this tendency downward. He earnestly supported the better men in the party, and tried to prevent the dangerous ones from obtaining power.

So long as the high national principles for which the party stood were in the least in danger, and were acquiring a settled permanence, he viewed these disquieting signs as morbid growths upon a body healthy in the main, and which the general strength of the body could throw off, like boils or skin eruptions on a strong man—painful and unsightly, but not dangerous to life nor difficult to cure.

But as the government became more and more settled, and as the questions which called the Republican party into existence and which followed in the reconstructive period became more and more fixed facts, he noticed with increasing disquietude that the struggles at the national election were becoming more a contest for party supremacy than for national security, where personal benefit was rapidly outstripping the country’s welfare. At each election the politicians on either side found an increasingly greater difficulty in framing a platform that should differ in any important particular from its opponent’s, save on the tariff question, regarding which Mr. Beecher was not in accord with his party. The party platforms were rapidly becoming noticeable only for the ingenuity with which the same ideas were expressed in high-sounding phrases, differing only in words.

Even as far back as 1877, in a sermon published under the title of “Past Perils and Perils of To-day,” he gave an intimation of his growing feeling, almost prophetic:

“The perils of the hour are the last that I shall mention, and they are the least. Whatever may betide the questions that are 575now at issue, they will result in nothing worse than simple transient mischief, moral, political, and civil. The foundations are settled. The future policy of this nation, whichever hands undertake to hold the helm, is assured. I would rather that the nation, which has been rescued by the great Republican party, and borne through all the shoals and whirls and troubles of the reconstructive period, for which they are now receiving more curses than kindnesses, and whose mistakes are multiplied before the eyes of men, while their wisdom is little thought of—I would rather that this nation should remain in their hands, if they are worthy to hold the helm; but if not, give me a hand that can hold the helm, whosesoever it is. If their light is extinguished along the coast, and they have no longer power to guide the ship of state to a safe harbor, let other lights be kindled. We cannot afford to wait for any party. The nation is more important than any party. It is not, then, any particular peril of a change of administration that is to be feared. I look upon that with interest, but still with equanimity.”

He noticed with jealous interest the men who were growing up and pushing to the front in the Republican party, studying their characters, watching their actions, noting their words to see toward what they were tending, whether good or evil, whether they would be safe leaders and wise administrators. So that when the notable campaign of 1884 began, and the conventions were called to select the candidates for the Presidency, he had very clearly defined opinions as to the fitness of the various aspirants in both parties, the result of long and careful observation.

Of course his first concern was as to the action of the Republican party. He earnestly hoped that the party would have the wisdom to renominate President Arthur.

When General Arthur was called to the Presidential chair by the sad death of General Garfield, Mr. Beecher, in common with many others, had grave misgivings as to his wisdom and ability to administer so important an office. But he developed such unexpected administrative ability, showed so much wisdom and such rare fortitude in resisting his party’s leaders, in any unwise or hurtful action, and so much discrimination in the exercise of his veto power, that he won the admiration and esteem of those who had, with doubt and solicitude, seen him enter upon his untried duties.

576Every instinct of good sense, every argument of wisdom, urged his renomination; the precedents of the party gave him a second term.

With this feeling Mr. Beecher was fully in accord. So when a meeting of merchants and business men was called at the Cooper Institute, early in the summer of 1884, to give expression to this sentiment, Mr. Beecher very gladly accepted an invitation to address it.

He had a double reason in advocating General Arthur’s renomination, or rather two reasons, one positive and the other negative.

He had acquired great confidence in General Arthur, and admiration for his past administration. He believed that he was by all odds the best man in his party for the place.

He also felt sure that if General Arthur was not nominated, Mr. Blaine would be, and in Mr. Blaine he saw, as he believed, a very serious threatening danger. He was one of the men whose career he had carefully watched, and for whom he had a very pronounced distrust. Of him he said:

“For twelve years I have watched him, anxious that he should be the right man—that he is not. For more than ten years I have been afraid of him.”

Behind Mr. Blaine, as his earnest advocates, he saw the men who had been most prominent in the jobbery and corruption that had, from time to time, broken out like plague-spots in different parts of the country.

He strongly felt that his election would be regarded by the world at large as an endorsement of the idea, painfully prevalent, that all a man should aim at in politics is success, no matter how.

He deeply regretted the unwisdom of not renominating General Arthur.

When the National Convention put Mr. Blaine in nomination Mr. Beecher had three courses left open to him: either (1) support Mr. Blaine, as his party’s nominee regularly presented by the National Convention; or (2) stay at home and not vote; or (3) support the opposing candidate.

To the first his answer was:

“It is almost the one argument I hear on every hand: ‘I don’t like Blaine. He was not my choice, but then he is the regular nominee of our party.’

577“Why, according to your logic, you must vote for whomsoever the convention gives you. If the convention had given you Tweed, every mother’s son of you would have dropped your tail between your legs and voted for Tweed. The logic of this is infamous.... You would not do it anywhere else, I tell you, except where the murrain of a blighted politics had fallen upon you.”

The second course had too much of prudential shirking to suit Mr. Beecher’s temperament. If the Republican nominee was an unfit man to vote for, he was an unfit man to be elected; and, unless his opponent should be as conspicuously unfit, every vote should be so cast as to affect the greatest result.

The third course alone seemed open, and when the Democratic Convention, in a sudden spasm of good sense and wisdom, nominated Governor Cleveland, Mr. Beecher’s mind was speedily made up.

With the first outbreak of that campaign of slanders Mr. Beecher was greatly disturbed. He at once requested some personal friends residing in Buffalo, and well acquainted with Governor Cleveland’s life and reputation, themselves Republicans, to make a thorough investigation of the scandalous stories in circulation, and was satisfied from their report that with the one exception, admitted, repented of, and lived down by a life of honesty and integrity, the stories were false.

Once satisfied of their falsity, he entered into the campaign with all his old-time fire and zeal.

His indignation was intensely roused at their circulation, and it only needed the timid caution of friends, that he would injure himself, by advocating the cause of a man about whom such stories were told, to arouse him to an outburst of indignant scorn.

“In all the history of politics we do not believe that lies so cruel, so base, so atrocious have ever been set in motion. The air is murky with the shameless stories of Mr. Cleveland’s private life. To our sorrow and shame we find these cockatrice’s eggs brooded and hatched by rash and credulous clergymen. They could not go to Mr. Cleveland with honest inquiry, so they opened their ears to the harlot and the drunkard. They have sought by hint, innuendo, irresponsible slander, to poison the faith of holy men, of innocent women, and they have sought to make back-biting a copt virtue, and to change the sanctuary into 578a salacious whispering-gallery. Is it for our sins, or for a trial of our faith, that God has permitted the plagues of Egypt to revisit us? The land swarms with vermin, frogs slime our bread-troughs, and lice crawl about our chambers.

“Do timid ministers ever reflect that the guilt of a vice or a crime measures the guilt of him who charges them falsely? Slander takes on the guilt of crime alleged. True religion does not creep through twilight passages, but is open, frank, rejoicing not in iniquity, but rejoicing in the truth, hoping all things. These vespertilian saints, whose soft bat’s wings bear them from house to house, and from town to town, in the service of Baal, the God of flies and lies, will one day creep into the holes and clefts of rocks and hide themselves....

“When in the gloomy night of my own suffering I sounded every depth of sorrow, I vowed that if God would bring the day star of hope I would never suffer brother, friend, or neighbor to go unfriended should a like serpent seek to crush him. That oath I will regard now. Because I know the bitterness of venomous lies, I will stand against infamous lies that seek to sting to death an upright man and magistrate. Men counsel me to prudence lest I stir again my own griefs. No! I will not be prudent. If I refuse to interpose a shield of well-placed confidence between Governor Cleveland and the swarm of liars that nuzzle in the mud, or sling arrows from ambush, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth and my right hand forget its cunning! I will imitate the noble example set me by Plymouth Church in the day of my calamity. They were not ashamed of my bonds. They stood by me with God-sent loyalty. It was a heroic deed. They have set my duty before me, and I will imitate their example.”

Of course many of Mr. Beecher’s friends were greatly exercised, and lamented what they feared would be a suicidal course. Again, for the twentieth time or more, he was rushing upon self-destruction—his prestige would be destroyed, his influence lost, and untold woes would follow.

As we look back, scarce three years, we cannot but smile, in the light of subsequent events, at the great excitement and grief that existed then.

But then it was real. Every effort was made at first to win Mr. Beecher to support Mr. Blaine, and then that he should not 579support Governor Cleveland, and this was carried even to the extent of threats.

The excitement threatened a serious division in his church, and the danger seemed more real than on any previous occasion. Party zeal ran high.

But Mr. Beecher had acted only after careful deliberation; being satisfied as to what his duty was, no argument could sway him in the least that appealed to his fears or personal benefit.

To a clerical friend who wrote in early autumn, just before the real campaign began, he replied:

“... But, now, hear me. If I thought it my duty to speak for Cleveland and against Blaine, I would do it, though I lost all my influence, all my friends, my church, and even my own family. All considerations urged upon me which touch my feelings, hopes, interests, are repelled by me with the whole force of my nature, and I cannot treat my friends better than I do my innermost self. I will not be bribed even by love. I have but a few years left. They shall not put to shame all my anti-slavery days. I do not doubt that you love me, but if you loved me yet more you would urge me to stand firmly to my conscientious convictions and not heed ‘what men can do unto me.’ The election of Blaine will be a sign of such demoralized moral sense as I never dreamed could befall Christian men and ministers; or I should feel so, if I had not seen good men and ministers in the great anti-slavery struggle....

“I wish you would say to all my honest-hearted brethren, please let me alone! I am as old as you are, as diligent in seeking the truth, and as conscientious in deciding and acting.”

To a letter of remonstrance and advice from a dear friend, a member of his church, he wrote:

“I am sure that I receive with consideration any advice which grown-up men desire to lay before me, especially those of my church. But, on the other hand, I hope the brethren will take into consideration that I am as much interested in being right as they can possibly be, and that I have had some experience in public life, and that all that is said in the newspapers, and constituting the knowledge in which the brethren act, is also before me, and that I have a profound interest in the welfare of the nation and of the young men in it.

“That, after forty years’ hot experience of stormy times, I 580have been led, hitherto by God’s providence, to the right conclusion.

“I am still in God’s hands, and daily ask His guiding providence. What more?

“The alarm of friends, the party excitement of others, has no effect upon me whatever. Any new and real information I shall be grateful for, but to tell me nothing, and only to express amazement, wonder, concern, etc., and let me know how damaging to my reputation and interests it will be if I follow my judgment, and not theirs, who love me as I am sure these brethren do, indicates how far gone in political excitement they are, and how little they understand the man whom they love.

“I shall do my duty as God reveals it to me, without a moment’s consideration of its effect on me. I am ready to resign my pastorate at an hour’s notice, when I no longer have freedom to follow my convictions, or when doing so divides the church and scatters the congregation.

“I am thankful to the brethren who have written; even more so to those who have not.

“I receive ten to forty letters a day from all over the land, clean and unclean, and merely glance at them and burn them.”

To one who went to the extent of threats he replied:

“Your remarkable note of August 8th is received. I have nothing to say to the general views, except that every man should determine his duty for himself and respect the same liberty in other people.

“To your closing sentence, which contains the threat that, if I vote for Cleveland, you ‘(I) shall feel compelled to withdraw from your Church and your teachings,’ I would only say that, having profited so little by my teachings, as this arrogant sentence indicates, I should certainly advise you to change your church relations in the hope of better results.”

It was not until the campaign had gotten under full headway, and within three or four weeks of the election, that Mr. Beecher began to take any very active part in it. At first he intended to speak only in New York and Brooklyn; but as the campaign progressed he realized the importance of devoting every energy to securing the States of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Accordingly, during the last two weeks he spoke every day save Sunday, and on some days twice, visiting the more important 581cities of those three States. He was very earnest that the “Independents” should not enter the Democratic party, but should organize as “Independent Republicans.”

He thought that it was time that the political managers should understand, that there was a moral sense in the community that would not submit to bad nominations; that the best way to redeem his party was by defeating unworthy nominees, and that, if this was persisted in, the politicians would soon see the necessity of deferring to an enlightened public sentiment, and putting in nomination only its best men.

He felt that the Republican party was being misled, by the same influences that had secured unwise or improper nominations, into a very dangerous path, that would ultimately lead to the utter destruction of the party itself.

In one of his earlier speeches in the campaign of 1884, he voiced that feeling when he spoke of his appearing in opposition to the organized action of the party:

“I confess, at the risk of the imputation of some immodesty, that my appearance here to-night, to antagonize the organized action of the Republican party, is itself a fact of the most significant character. Before many of you were born I was rocking the cradle of the Republican party. I fought its early battles when it was in an apparently hopeless minority. I advocated its cause, speaking day and night, at the risk of my health and of my life itself, which I counted as nothing compared with the interests of my country, when Fremont was our first notable candidate. When Mr. Lincoln became our candidate I gave all I had of time, strength, influence, and persuasion, and when his election was ascertained and efforts were made to intimidate the North, and to prevent his being inaugurated, I went up and down through this country stiffening the backs of willow-backed patriots. I faced mobs, I preached day and night in my own church, to hold the North up to its own rights and interests. When the war broke out, I sent to it the only boy I had big enough to hold a musket. And as the war went on my contribution could not be much, but such as it was I gave it—I gave it as a mother gives her breast to her child.

“And when, seeking some rest from exhausting cares and labors, I went abroad, I did not suffer the grass to grow under my feet, but, in the face of royalty and aristocracy and of great 582wealth in England, I upheld the justice and the rectitude of the cause for which we were all striving. And at every canvass from that day to this I have not held back health, strength, or influence. Why, then, is it that I am now opposed to the organized movement of the Republican party? That is a significant question.

“I am now opposing the party whose cradle I rocked, because I do not mean to be a pall-bearer to carry the coffin of that party to the grave. The Republican party is on its way to destruction, unless you turn the switch and run it on a side track. And by all my love of my country—and it is next to my love of my God—by all my pride in the past, I feel bound to do whatever God will inspire me to do, to stop the ruinous progress of the Republican party and to save it.

“It behooves you, therefore, not to make mere amusement of the work of this evening. I speak to you as to a jury. The case before you is not that of some trembling culprit, or some wronged citizen seeking redress. It is your whole country that is before you to-night, whose cause I am to plead—to plead as if life or death hung on the issues. I am in dead earnest. It is very natural that men working through a political party, should, by and by, come to look upon all events in the community in their relation to party welfare and party success. But I, who have had nothing to do with parties, except as moral instruments, naturally look upon their movements and purposes from the moral standpoint. What are they attempting to do for this great people? What does their success mean? How does it stand alongside the intelligence, the morality, the true religion of this people, alongside that patriotism which rests its feet on morality, but whose head stands in the spirituality which connects man with God? I study public affairs from the moral and religious standpoint, and that which is offensive to God may I never live to see the day when it may be acceptable to me and to my countrymen.

“Looking forward, as the pilot looks, what are our perils? The war is over. The great questions that agitated the community are past. You can’t bring them back. There are, however, two great dangers that betide our government. One is the danger that comes from the corrupt use of wealth; the other, that which comes from the corruption of too-long-held power. 583It is a common proverb, ‘An honest man can bear watching; a dishonest man needs it.’ This is just as true of politics as of common procedure. This is the age of enterprise, of production, of commerce—of money. Russia, Austria, and France failed in their greatest recent wars and enterprises because those countries were honeycombed with official corruption. We are in danger from the same cause.”

He regarded the introduction of the moral element into politics as an event of the greatest importance.

Politics had become so eminently “practical” that any one who should suggest the wisdom, or even propriety, of basing political action on any moral principle, was in danger of being laughed at as a “crank,” “dude,” or “political pharisee.”

And when in the birth of the Prohibition party, and the sudden uprising of the Independent Republicans, he saw the attempt to found practical politics upon a purely moral foundation, he hailed them both as among the most hopeful signs of the times.

Writing of these two movements, he said:

“Men of moral aims have been ruled out as impracticables, as ignorant of real politics, as enthusiasts and sentimentalists, as idealists and doctrinaires. This has been very true, and they have hitherto hung on the border of parties like a fringe of no substance or use. But the development of the party of Prohibitionists and of Independent Republicans is a disclosure, it seems to me, of a great providential development in politics, and that there is to be hereafter a place found for the moral elements in the politics of our country!

“I have spoken of the two formative elements as likely to coalesce. For, though there be thousands who cannot become technical prohibitionists, yet they will help them to create a higher moral sentiment on the subject of temperance.”

The results of the election and the part that Mr. Beecher took therein have become history, and need not be further detailed.

Mr. Beecher’s action was not, as has been erroneously suggested, caused by any sudden impulse. On the contrary, it was the result of careful and earnest deliberation, and was not taken until his mind was fully made up, and it retained the approval of his later judgment, after the heat and excitement of the contest had died out.

584In his Thanksgiving sermons, it was his custom to review to some extent the political as well as material growth of the country, to find in both whatever there might be fit for thanksgiving.

On Thanksgiving, 1884, he, at first, intended to review the course of the events of the campaign just completed, and commenced a sermon for that purpose. After writing a part, he changed his plans and prepared another, in which he reviewed the reconstruction of the country since the war. From this we have quoted in a previous chapter.

The manuscript of his unfinished sermon we have, and, though it is a fragment only, it will be of value as showing his more sober judgment, reviewing in retrospect the campaign just past and his part therein.

“During the great political campaign which has just terminated, I have scrupulously refrained from introducing into the pulpit, or into the social meetings of this church, a word that, directly or indirectly, had any bearing upon politics.

“Not that I had not the right, but because it was not expedient. Out of the bounds of the church I felt called to take an active part.

“I am not willing that you should be ignorant of my inmost motives, and that you should have spread out before you the whole map of affairs as looked at from my standpoint. Many of you, steadfast friends, will not agree with my theory and judgment of my duty; but you will acquit me of apostasy, or of inconsistency, and perhaps will even admit that, if my view of the whole condition of national affairs was correct, my action and career have been in one direction for forty years, and that the very influences which led me to help in the formation of the Republican party, to accept its hardships, its perils, its reproaches, in all the successive periods of its development, have at this late day led me to dissent from its aims and policy. I have not left the party. I am standing on the very ground over which the battles have raged, when I have lost good repute and suffered endless revilings.

“No, I have left nothing. If there has been any change, it is not in me. I would not take one step away from those great moral principles which have been the strength of this great historic party.

585“Others may think that I have mistaken the reality of affairs, and been misled by will-o’-wisp lights.

“But, taking all counsel of all sobriety and deliberation, every true man must follow his own ripe judgment. I have followed mine, and, looking back over the canvass, I should be conceited indeed if I said that I had been perfect, had carried a cool intensity always, said nothing too severely. Accepting my own limitations, I nevertheless look back upon the past few months as worthy to be associated with the months and years of half a century of public labor, and indeed, if you will forgive the conceit, I regard this service as the very blossom of my life.

“These words I speak to my friends and to my church. I owe no apology or explanation to the public. But to the great multitude of members of the Church and society, with whom so much of my life has been spent, whose friendship and love I have had, whose unity of heart and soul around me has been the source of so much gladness and strength; to you, fathers, mothers, and friends of every name—to you, laying aside my too sensitive pride and my somewhat fierce sense of personal independence, I shall to-day unbosom myself, and shall try to give you a bird’s-eye view of the condition of the United States at this hour, and my understanding of what it is that God’s providence is calling us to.

“I shall enumerate, point by point, the themes for thanksgiving to-day:

“To-day is waging a great battle between Optimism and Pessimism. What is Optimism? That happy temperament which leads one to see all things in a hopeful light and in a joyful courage.

“What is Pessimism? It is that structure of mind which inclines one to see all events in a sad and discouraging way. Either disposition carried to its farthest limit is unphilosophical. Good is not all good; bad is not all bad. Good and evil are combined, like lights and shadows in art—sometimes, as in Rembrandt, voluminous darkness nursing a small spot of light; sometimes all light and hardly enough dark to cast a shadow.

“In looking at our own day and our own country there is both light and shadow. There are reasons for criticism and regret, but more for gladness and thanksgiving.

“Great excitements in monarchical governments are great dangers. When the government takes care of the people, the 586people feel little need of caring for themselves. When the people, by the genius of their institutions, are to look out for themselves, they learn how, like lofty trees, to let violent winds sway all their branches without disturbing the root. That is anchored fast.

“The roaring anger of the wind and the sharp cry of anguish in the resisting branches soon pass and die away, and the tree, unclasped by the demon Storm, comes back to peace, only a few leaves lost, a few branches twisted.

“Three weeks ago a foreigner, beholding the superlative excitement of the whole community, East, North, West, and South, would have thought that there could never be peace more. Newspapers flew like unquenchable arrows every whither, business was almost forgotten, the streets were crowded processions, meetings were convoked, and men of every profession, arguing, appealing, inflamed the people. Friends let go each other’s hands, families were divided for a time. Words ran high, every truth was carried to the utmost limit of violence. A wordy prophesy filled the land, of good or of evil. The lawyer forgot his brief, the artist his æsthetic dream, the merchant his bargains, the judge the plushy decorum of the bench. Refined ministers of the Gospel, loving elegant retiracy, burst forth in interviews. Venerable pastors presided at wild political demonstrations, and some even went forth speaking up and down the land, like Saul of old, in prophesying fury. Hundreds of honored and beloved ministers marched in full panoply of zeal, like Balaam of old, to curse....

“Three weeks have passed! It is all gone. No more banners, lanterns, transparencies, or shouts of men. The lamps are out, the men gone home to work, trades resumed, the lawyer to the courts, the clergyman to his pulpit. The anger, the scare, the grief of surprise that everybody had, that everybody should have said or done what everybody did, is dying out, the sore places are healing, friends are reaching out kindly hands again.

“The storm that darkened the heavens, the turbulent sea that thundered on the shore, have resumed their peaceful mien. The only mourners are they who sought and found not, who knocked and unto whom it was not opened. Even they will ere long cool their anger, shorten their sighs, and, like a weary child in its mother’s lap, hide all its grief in sleep.”

587Mr. Beecher was very much gratified, not only at the election of Mr. Cleveland, for whom he had grown to feel a strong personal friendship, and in whose administration, despite the occasional mistakes that proved even the President to be subject to the fallibilities of mankind, he found so much of moral courage, firmness, and honest good sense to admire and approve, but in addition to these reasons, he felt that an administration in which the South should be permitted to have a part, meant the reuniting of the country in fact as well as in name, and a fitting sequel to that reconstruction which he had so earnestly advocated nearly twenty years before. He had earnestly prayed that he might see the day when our country should be one nation, without the lines of a bitter sectionalism, dividing North from South or East from West; and in his last year expressed the great satisfaction he felt in the part he had been permitted to play in bringing about such a result.

A Preacher—His Place—His Training—His Estimate of the Work—Defects—Effectual Call—Upon Drawing an Audience—His Theory—Preparation—Results—A Theologian—His Orthodoxy—Evolution—Ordinances—Christian Unity—Sectarianism—Peacemaker.

It now belongs to us, among the closing chapters of this biography, to speak of Henry Ward Beecher, or rather to allow him, for the most part, to speak for himself, as a preacher, a theologian, and an administrator of ordinances—three spheres of activity so blended that it is of advantage to treat them together. His doctrines necessarily shaped his preaching, his preaching colored and emphasized his theology, and both together determined his estimate of the Church as an organized body, and the value of its rites and ceremonies.

Among them, the preacher stood pre-eminent. He himself regarded preaching as especially his vocation, and in his judgment it ranked highest of all earthly pursuits. Nowhere else was he so happy as in this his chosen work. As a preacher he was most widely known, and for his labors in this sphere, we doubt not, he will be the longest remembered.

His field was broader than was ever before given to any preacher, and no man that ever lived preached continuously to so large and influential audiences. During his forty years in Plymouth pulpit men from every part of the civilized world came to hear him, and to every part of the civilized world did his published sermons find their way, bringing instruction, inspiration, and comfort to multitudes.

Of his rank as a preacher, it is not for us to speak dogmatically. We stood too near him—perhaps all men of the present time stand too near him—to be impartial judges. Many letters and reports of sermons have come to us in which he is given the first place among the preachers of this age, and a few, among them some from men who themselves hold the first rank, place him before all preachers since the Apostle Paul. Which of these, 589or whether either, is the true estimate or not, it does not belong to us nor to any man living to decide; but we believe that the latter judgment will in time largely prevail.

The open heart that receives inspiration of God; the prophetic insight of the true preacher that sees into the heart of things, and sees God there, and believes, with an intense conviction born of experience, that God’s nature is love; that this love is not for the Jew only, for those of favored lineage, of excellent position, of high moral standard and attainment, or of right belief, but is for the Gentile, for the wandering, the erring, the lost, outside the Church, outside even the sympathies and hope of religious men, the only power that can save, but able to save to the uttermost; the ability to see this love incarnated in Jesus Christ and feel it as sunshine upon the soul, continually dispelling the darkness; to love Him, as He is so manifested, with an all-absorbing passion of personal affection, before which all things pass away from their old adjustments and become new; to see Him not only head of the Church, but head over all things; to find in Him the centre of unity which the world needs, middle walls of partition between Jew and Gentile, between learned and unlearned, between ranks and classes, between science and religion, broken down; the power to rejoice in sufferings for His sake, to bear without faltering, to love without failing, although “the more we love the less we be loved”; the ability to open this Gospel to others, in speech that moved all hearts, as the winds move the tree-tops, that never touched an object, however common, but to leave it exalted, set in some new and higher relation; the ability to move men to think, to act, to love—all this, we believe, has never been possessed to an equal degree with Mr. Beecher by any preacher since Saint Paul preached to the Athenians, taking the altar of the unknown god for his text; since he described charity to the Corinthians, told the Colossians that all the creation consists, stands in harmony, in Jesus Christ, and wrote the Epistle to the Ephesians. Nor do we believe that to any one but to him has there been given a work that so nearly resembled that of the great Apostle to the Gentiles, whose part it was to bridge over by a living faith, or rather by faith in a living One, the vast differences that kept classes and orders and nationalities separate; to give expression to the new and broader hope; 590to reconcile the old to the new and more vital faith, and show the relation of a risen Lord to a material universe. But in this we may be unduly prejudiced by our affection. We will let the sifting processes of the years decide.

That he became a minister, as did his brothers, by reason of the unswerving faith and prayer of the parents, is already well known. “Out of six sons not one escaped from the pulpit.” “My mother dedicated me to the work of the foreign missionary; she laid her hands upon me, wept over me, and set me apart to preach the Gospel among the heathen, and I have been doing it all my life long, for it so happens one does not need to go far from his own country to find his audience before him.”

Ushered into the preparation for the ministry by the parental faith, stumbling and discouraged and ready to give up the work, another hand was not wanting to open still more clearly the way, draw back the curtains, and let in the light:

“I beheld Him as a helper, as the soul’s midwife, as the soul’s physician, and I felt because I was weak I could come to Him; because I did not know how, and, if I did know, I had not the strength, to do the things that were right—that was the invitation that He gave to me out of my conscious weakness and want. I will not repeat the scene of that morning when light broke fairly on my mind; how one might have thought that I was a lunatic escaped from confinement; how I ran up and down through the primeval forest of Ohio, shouting, ‘Glory, glory!’ sometimes in loud tones and at other times whispered in an ecstasy of joy and surprise. All the old troubles gone, and light breaking in on my mind, I cried: ‘I have found my God; I have found my God!’ From that hour I consecrated myself to the work of the ministry anew, for before that I had about made up my mind to go into some other profession.”

His early training-school for effective preaching was well selected. It was, as is well known, one of the little villages on the banks of the Ohio River, where the wants of river barge-men and frontiermen demanded his attention. It was there he decided what his life-work should be.

“‘My business shall be to save men, and to bring to bear upon them those views that are my comfort, that are the bread of life to me’; and I went out among them almost entirely cut loose from the ordinary church institutions and agencies, knowing 591nothing but ‘Christ, and Him crucified,’ the sufferer for mankind. Did not the men round me need such a Saviour? Was there ever such a field as I found? Every sympathy of my being was continually solicited for the ignorance, for the rudeness, for the aberrations, for the avarice, for the quarrelsomeness of the men among whom I was, and I was trying every form and presenting Christ as a medicine to men. I went through the woods and through camp-meetings and over prairies. Everywhere my vacations were all missionary tours, preaching Christ for the hope of salvation. I am not saying this to show you how I came to the knowledge of Christ, but to show you how I came to the habit and forms of my ministry. I tried everything on to folks.”

Added to the forces of experience and surroundings was always that of his own personal, natural endowment. This he found fault with and tried to change, as most people do at some period of their lives, but finally accepted and concluded to use as best he could, without murmuring, but always conscious of its limitations.

“I have my own peculiar temperament, I have my own method of preaching, and my method and temperament necessitate errors. I am not worthy to be related in the hundred-thousandth degree to those more happy men who never make a mistake in the pulpit. I make a great many. I am impetuous. I am intense at times on subjects that deeply move me. I feel as though all the ocean were not strong enough to be the power behind my words, nor all the thunders that were in the heavens, and it is of necessity that such a nature as that should give such intensity at times to parts of doctrine as to exaggerate them when you come to bring them into connection with a more rounded-out and balanced view. I know it—I know it as well as you do. I would not do it if I could help it; but there are times when it is not I that is talking, when I am caught up and carried away so that I know not whether I am in the body or out of the body, when I think things in the pulpit that I never could think in the study, and when I have feelings that are so far different from any that belong to the lower or normal condition that I neither can regulate them nor understand them. I see things and I hear sounds, and seem, if not in the seventh heaven, yet in a condition that leads me to understand what Paul said—that he heard 592things which it was not possible for a man to utter. I am acting under such a temperament as that. I have got to use it, or not preach at all. I know very well I do not give crystalline views nor thoroughly guarded views; there is often an error on this side and an error on that, and I cannot stop to correct them. A man might run around, like a kitten after its tail, all his life, if he were going around explaining all his expressions and all the things he had written. Let them go. They will correct themselves. The average and general influence of a man’s teaching will be more mighty than any single misconception, or misapprehension through misconception.”

Successful as he was, he yet had none of the self-conceit that would lead him to believe that he had reached perfection; on the contrary, his language was always that of one who had not yet attained, but was continually reaching out unto it. “Young gentlemen, I want to tell you true preaching is yet to come. Of all professions for young men to look forward to, I do not know another one that seems to me to have such scope before it, in the future, as preaching.

“And as my years increase I want to bear a testimony. I suppose I have had as many opportunities as any man here, or any living man, of what are called honors and influence and wealth. The doors have been opened, the golden doors, for years. I want to bear witness that the humblest labor which a minister of God can do for a soul for Christ’s sake is grander and nobler than all learning, than all influence and power, than all riches. And, knowing so much as I do of society, I have this declaration to make: that if I were called to live my life over again, and I were to have a chance of the vocations which men seek, I would again choose, and with an impetus arising from the experience of this long life, the ministry of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, for honor, for cleanliness, for work that never ends, having the promise of the life that now is as well as of that which is to come—I would choose the preaching of the Gospel: to them that perish, foolishness; to them that believe and accept it, life everlasting.”

And that not because of great success: “There is a deep enjoyment in having devoted yourself, soul and body, to the welfare of your fellow-men, so that you have no thought and no care but for them. There is a pleasure in that which is never touched by 593any ordinary experiences in human life. It is the highest. I look back to my missionary days as being transcendently the happiest period of my life. The sweetest pleasures I have ever known are not those that I have now, but those that I remember, when I was unknown, in an unknown land, among a scattered people, mostly poor, and to whom I had to go and preach the Gospel, man by man, house by house, gathering them on Sundays, a few—twenty, fifty, or a hundred, as the case might be—and preaching the Gospel more formally to them as they were able to bear it.”

In his whole course we believe that he was as little moved by personal ambition as any man could possibly be. Upon his graduation he took the first church that asked for his services—as undesirable a church at that time probably, in position, character, and strength, as could well have been found. And the two removes he made were the result of necessity rather than of choice. He had no large and stock sermons with which to awaken the admiration of men. Large subjects he had in plenty, but the sermon was such as grew at the time.

From our knowledge of him we believe he spoke with absolute truthfulness when he says:

“I have had no ambitions; I have sought no laurels; I have deliberately rejected many things that would have been consonant to my taste. It would have been for me a great delight to be a scholar; I should have relished exceedingly to have perfected my thought in the study, and to have given it such qualities as that it should stand as classics stand. But when the work was pressed upon me, and my relations to my own country and to mankind became urgent, I remember, as if it were but yesterday, when I laid my literary ambition and my scholarly desires upon the altar and said: ‘If I can do more for my Master and for men by my style of thinking and working, I am willing to work in a second-rate way; I am willing to leave writing behind my back; I am willing not to carve statues of beauty, but simply to do the things that would please God in the salvation of men.’”

He had not only no ambitions for himself, but he had no patience in that seeking for place which, sometimes with the best of intentions, ministers adopt. We well remember how, early in our ministry, hearing that a larger church was offered to us, and 594fearing lest, in our inexperienced zeal, we might accept, he telegraphed us not to decide until we had seen him, but to come on to Brooklyn, that he might urge upon us the importance of a young man’s staying in his first parish until “he had done something,” by which he meant doing the work he had gone there to undertake.

Two things he considered essential to an effectual call to the minister to change his parish: one was “an open door in front, and the other was a kick from behind.” It was not enough that there was an open door; some pressure of health or dissatisfaction was needed to make a perfect call. What a man was to do when he got the kick, and there was no open door in front, we do not remember.

Again he writes me:

His theory of preaching, which came to be formed out of his experience of the grace of God and his labors for men, he himself has given:

“To preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ; to have Christ so melted and dissolved in you that when you preach your own self you preach Him as Paul did; to have every part of you living and luminous with Christ, and then to make use of everything that is in you, your analogical reasoning, your logical reasoning, your imagination, your mirthfulness, your humor, your indignation, your wrath; to take everything that is in you all steeped in Jesus Christ, and to throw yourself with all your power upon a congregation—that has been my theory of preaching the Gospel. A good many folks have laughed at the idea of my being a fit preacher because I laughed, and because I made somebody else laugh. I never went out of my way to do it in my life; but if some sudden turn of a sentence, like the crack of a whip, sets men off, I do not think any worse of it for that—not a bit. I have felt that man should consecrate every gift that he has got in him that has any relation to the persuasion of men and to the melting of men—that he should put them all on the altar, kindle them all, and let them burn for Christ’s sake. I have never 596sought singularity, and I have never avoided singularity. When they wanted some other sort of teaching I have always said, ‘Get it. If you want my kind, here I am ready to serve you; if you do not, serve yourself better.’”

For this preaching there was always going on a certain preparation, almost involuntarily. It consisted in a constant study of the processes of nature around him, examining them and digesting them, until he saw the relations in which they stood to other facts, and a principle was discovered or an illustration of some deeper moral and spiritual truth was gained. This action of his mind, we believe, became almost automatic. He had an insatiable curiosity to learn facts. But he wanted them for the same reason that a miller wants grain, to grind and make bread. So he worked them over until he had got something from them that fed his mind or heart, and this was the only way he could remember them.

For this preaching there had been carried on for years a study of the Bible. The evidences, found in note-books and books of analysis, of his broad and painstaking study of the Gospels have astonished us. People seeing him always on the wing, finding him never in his study—in fact, having in his house no study-room, as such—got the impression that he worked but little; but they made a great mistake. He worked, but it was in his own way. The winter that I saw him most he had Stanley’s “Commentary upon the Epistles to the Corinthians,” which he carried for weeks in his carpet-bag, studied, and annotated from beginning to end. Mr. Pond, who has travelled with him thousands of miles, says that Bible reading and study was a part of his daily work while on the train.

The results of such reading and study appear in scores of little note-books that he used, some of which lie before us, containing subjects, heads of sermons jotted down at moments of inspiration, in the family circle, on the railroad, in the street-car, after a talk with some friend, written for the most part in that strong, full hand that is so well known, sometimes plainly, at other times so obscurely as to make it doubtful if he himself could read it after it had become cold.

This was his method of getting subjects. These were the acorn thoughts, out of which grew up in time strong, wide-spreading oak-tree sermons.

597With eyes wide open to see things, he kept his active sympathy and hearty fellow-feeling for men in exercise by constant intercourse with those about him. Some have a regard for mankind in general, but only criticism and coldness for the concrete specimen before them. This was not the case with him; he liked the common men of the present, and made it an object to get acquainted with them and to be with them. Very seldom did he cross the river on the ferry-boat but he made his way up into the pilot-house, to which a key had been given him, to have a talk with the pilot.

We have been often asked, “How does Mr. Beecher prepare his sermons?” His general preparation we have already given. The more special preparation for preaching on the Sabbath began on Saturday and consisted in doing as little work as possible—doing what pleased him, making it a kind of active rest-day. Perhaps, if the weather permitted, he ran up to Peekskill to look over the place, and get rid of all friction and rasp by giving attention to its common and homely details, or to feed his imagination by looking out upon its beautiful landscape. Perhaps he spent it in the city. If so, he has probably been over to New York, looking into shop-windows, dropping into Appleton’s to look at books, or into Tiffany’s to look at gems, having a little chat in each place with some of the clerks. You may be sure he did not forget his afternoon nap of from one to two hours; wherever he was he aimed to secure that. He has fed well to-day, but has been careful not to eat anything that does not agree with him. He will have the body in perfect order for the great work of the morrow. The evening he spent quietly at home, or, possibly, ran into one or two of the homes where he was most familiar, where he could have his own way and be not bored by anybody’s trying to draw him out into some excited discussion. If you had followed him there you would very likely have found him taking his ease upon the sofa, while the family life went on around him, in which he took part by humorous sallies or quiet suggestions, as the fancy prompted him; home and a few games of backgammon with Mrs. Beecher, and to bed by eleven o’clock. Up to this time he has not decided upon the subject or text that he will handle on the morrow; to have chosen it so early as this, especially to have written any part of it down, would have killed his sermon the 598next day. He could not have kindled up to it and made it a living thing, if it had been for so long a time buried on parchment. Even upon so important a matter as his first lecture of the Lyman Beecher lectureship in Yale College—a new enterprise, with the faculty of the college as well as the clergymen of the city present, and his lecture to be reported in the religious press—he did not touch pen to paper until after he had reached New Haven, taken dinner, had his nap, and was within an hour of its delivery, although of course the subject-matter had been for a long time a-brewing. Then while shaving the outline came clear to his mind, and he slashed his face with his razor in his eagerness, but his lecture secured the hearty and grateful commendation of Dr. Leonard Bacon, who said: “If I had heard such talk as that before I began to preach, it would have made a better preacher of me.”

The decision was made in a general way when he awoke in the morning—that is, the kind of sermon he would preach that day. If he was heavy and a little cloudy in the higher faculties, he would select a subject that was in harmony with that state of mind. If he was stirred in spirit and imagination, a subject that drew upon those higher elements, and that ministered to the same in others, would be decided upon. There was no approach to a sanctimonious expression on his face as he came down to the breakfast-table, and he did not refuse to take part in the conversation, whatever it might be; and very likely there would some humorous remark drop from his lips, or he would steal the bread from the plate of one of the children as usual. Yet it was all done with the air of a man that had something that engaged his attention apart from us. Family prayers were likely to be short that morning, and if there were any of those delays that sometimes occur in the best-regulated families, he would depute some one else to conduct them. And then he locked himself in his own room, and for an hour and a half must be left undisturbed, except in the case of some imperative necessity, and then to be approached by no one but his wife. No noise in the halls. The hour of the whole week had come to him, and he must have it without interruption. Of course none of us, and no one but God, ever saw him in that hour, but we know that then he made his final and definite selection of a subject, perhaps taking it from one of those little note-books; that he wrote with his goose-quill 599pen, upon large sheets of paper, his introduction; that he put down head after head, with such opening as the time permitted, and gave a word of illustration here and there. The vision stood before him, and as hastily as possible he sketched the outline. As the bell began to ring for the last time, some fifteen minutes before the opening of the service, he would come out with his papers hastily thrown together and held in his hand, or thrust into his coat-pocket, and, with scarcely a word to any one, put on his hat, take Mrs. Beecher on his arm, and start for the church.

This hour may be shortened. It may be spent in some other place than in his study, but as a rule it was had, this time of supreme choice and arrangement, and jotting down the heads of his sermon. As an extreme illustration of his powers of making all places available, and to seize the most outwardly unpropitious surroundings for this final preparation, I can say from personal knowledge that the notes of the sermon which he preached in Charleston in 1865 to the thousands in Zion Church, and which was one of great scope and power, was outlined in the outhouse of the home where we were stopping, on scraps of envelopes which he happened to have with him. From thence we went directly to the church and to the delivery of that grand sermon. When I spoke to him afterwards about the sermon and its power, he said: “The vision came to me there, and if I could only have brought it out as I saw it, it would have been worth hearing; but I could not.”

When he preached upon the occasion of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Congregational Church in Stamford, he came into my house hastily, stopping only long enough to kiss his daughter as he hurried upstairs. In about fifteen minutes he came down, putting away some notes in his side-pocket, and said to her: “Well, I have got my sermon ready for the evening.” This was in the forenoon. Being prepared so long beforehand, it got cold before the time for its delivery, and when he went into the pulpit he felt barren and dry. Neither the singing by the choir nor the prayer by a brother minister, of which he spoke afterwards very highly, gave him the desired relief, and he sat with the fixed, settled expression of a man who is bound to do his duty as well as he can; but to those who knew him well there was a lack of the light in the eye and the 600deep, full, restful look of countenance which was marked in him when he was all prepared. It happened that we had at that time a solo-singer of great richness and sweetness of voice, and she sang for an offertory just before preaching. “The Three Kings of the Orient.” The sympathetic rendering of the words of that beautiful solo smote the rock; the waters gushed out and suffused soul and intellect, and the sermon was one of great power and beauty.

Because of its adaptation to awaken devotion in his own heart and in the hearts of his audience he valued organ music, but it must be rendered by one who himself felt its power and could express this feeling through the instrument. If the organist failed in this, no brilliancy of execution nor facility in rendering popular tunes could atone for the fundamental lack. By reason of John Zundel’s ability to express and interpret religious emotion he valued him above all players that ever officiated at the organ in Plymouth Church. As with the organ, so with the choir. No efficiency in the leader of the choir, in the machinery, could atone for the lack of appreciation of the devotional element in the music.

In the Scripture-reading he was himself, feeding upon the word which he read, drinking in and appropriating its truths; and in the prayer he came to the fountain-head, to Christ Himself, for refreshing and life power.

And now for the sermon itself. For the first few moments his eyes followed the manuscript closely. He seemed to be reading; perhaps he was, and perhaps there were only catch sentences upon the page which he was scanning so carefully. He was gathering his forces, getting under headway, making preparatory explanations, divisions, and definitions. He will get into the full, rushing current of thought and feeling and speech presently.

We can liken the whole process to nothing better than the descent of some of our Western rivers under the care of a skilful guide. You get into the boat in some sheltered cove. He takes the oar and pushes out gently but strongly, points out the rocks on either side and avoids them, and makes his way around some tree-top that has fallen in from the shore. Like to this was often Mr. Beecher’s opening. The current now is felt and begins to bear you along on its bosom, and in that hour all your life-experiences are gone over or pointed out to you. You are 601in the shallows where life seems poor and worthless, and he shows you how to find the deeper channels. He points out the pleasant places on the shore, and shows you where living springs burst out; takes you under the shadow of the lofty trees whose branches sweep down within your reach, and anon out under the clear, sun-lighted heaven. Swirls of temptation are before you, and he shows you how to steer straight through or how to avoid them. You are now in the very rapids, in the rush of the life that for six days in the week is roaring around you, and all things seem to be rushing to destruction; but this man is not disturbed. He is no still-water pilot. He has thoroughly studied that river and knows all its dangers. Through the fiercest rapids that ever boat was called upon to pass he will guide you safely; over the deepest fall that ever boats must venture he will stand by you. He goes with you until he has brought you into some quiet spot of God’s great and present mercy, or perhaps to the mouth of the river and in sight of the islands of the blest. What a hand was that, so gentle, skilful, strong! What a voice, so clear, tender, inspiring, confident! What a heart, that knew all the ways of sorrow! What a guide and helper he was! “O my father! my father! the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof!”

In the largeness of his audience, in his power over them for the time being, there can be no question; but how about the permanent results in growth and strength of Christian character, in making men and women Christlike?—for this, as he would be first to claim, is the only true success. Our first witness here, of course, must be Plymouth Church, the body that received most impress from the word he preached and the life he lived. One of the largest churches in the land, it has been called a drag-net “which has been cast into the sea and has gathered of every kind.” And undoubtedly it has its proportion of human weakness and imperfections, but, after making all deductions of this nature, it nevertheless remains true that, tried by all the tests that can apply to a church, it will answer as well as any that can be found. It has been singularly harmonious and free from quarrels and contention, and that under trials the like of which few churches have ever been called to endure. Its failures in Christian character have been as few; its works have been as broad and beneficent; its weekly care to provide for strangers that visited 602it as hospitable; its benevolent contributions as generous, we believe, as those of any other church. But, deeper than all this, and better than all, the spirit that has pervaded the church has been unusually kind, helpful, Christlike.

It was said that it had no life separate from Mr. Beecher. But the bearing of that body since the death of its pastor has given an emphatic denial to that statement. From the day that his body lay in state, and its members gathered like a stricken household around the coffin, the church, to all outward appearances, has been growing more earnest in developing its powers, more loving in its spirit. The seed so long planted is bearing fruit, the benediction so long resting upon it is showing its beauty, and is proving that indeed it is the fruit of but one thing, and that is the Gospel of God’s dear Son, of Jesus the Christ.

But other witnesses rise up to testify—troubled, weary, heartbroken souls the world over, who have read the sermons as they have come to them from Plymouth pulpit; and they bear witness that this one spake as he was moved of the Holy Ghost, that his message was of Him who came to heal the sick, to raise the dead, to set at liberty the captive.

We call to the witness-stand all ministers and all denominations of every name who have ever read his sermons or heard him preach, and they will testify that his message was of God.

Yea, we will go beyond this circle and ask those of other pursuits—laborers, workers, soldiers, actors—if there has not shone upon them something of the light that our Saviour shed upon all classes and conditions of men, and their answer will be unanimously in the affirmative. We go beyond the personality of men and come into the realm of beliefs and relationships, and affirm, without fear of denial, that theology is to-day more truthful, science more devout, religion more attractive, sectarianism less bitter, churches more loving, politics purer, property more humane, labor more faithful, social ranks more tolerant, and nations brought nearer together, by reason of the preaching of the Gospel by Henry Ward Beecher.

To speak of Mr. Beecher as a theologian will awaken, we are well aware, a smile of incredulity with many. It will be said that theology was not his forte; that he seldom made use of the term except to make fun of it, or of those who were its exponents and 603teachers. Now, we acknowledge that we might give a definition of this science in which he would appear to very poor advantage. But if theology can be considered as the knowledge of God in His relations to living men and to this present world, then was Mr. Beecher a theologian excelled by few now living or that ever have lived. He had this knowledge of God. It was as real to him as his own existence. He had the nature and order of God’s attributes very clearly settled in his own mind. He had His relations with the whole universe in which He dwelt very thoroughly outlined in his thought. He had his own system, upon which he worked from day to day, which included all existences and orders, and all times, and all worlds; that, as he believed, had a place for all truth that had ever been lived or revealed, and for all that ever should be lived or revealed, here, or in Saturn, or Sirius, in this present time or in the ages of ages. He made a great deal of fun of theologians, sometimes because of the one-sidedness of their views, sometimes because of their dryness, at others because of their pretensions, and partly because all classes of men were, in his view, at times objects of legitimate mirth-making. Yet nevertheless he greatly valued them and their work.

“Now, young gentlemen,” he said in his “Lectures to Yale Students,” “I have often indulged myself in words that would seem to undervalue theologians; but you know I do not mean it. I profess to be a theologian myself; my father was a theologian; my brothers are all theologians, and so are many men whom I revere, and who are the brightest lights of genius, I think, that have ever shone in the world. I believe in theologians, and yet I think it is perfectly fair to make game of them! I do not think there is anything in this world, whether it be man or that which is beneath a man, that is not legitimate food for innocent, innocuous fun; and if it should cast a ray of light on the truth and alleviate the tediousness of a lecture now and then to have a slant at theologians, why, I think they can stand it! It will not hurt them and it may amuse us. So let me speak freely—the more so because I affirm that it is indispensable for every man who is to do a considerable religious work during a long period, or with any degree of self-consistency, to be a theologian. He must have method; there must be a sequence of ideas in his thoughts. And if the work runs long enough and far enough, and embraces many things, there must be a system of applying 604means to ends, there must be a knowledge of instruments. These things are theology in a sense—a part of it, at any rate.”

Equally indispensable, in his view, was it that a man have a theology that would change by growth:

“As summer makes the tree so much larger that the bark has to let out a seam, because the old bark will not do for the new growth, and as the same thing takes place from season to season, so mental philosophy—for all theology is mental philosophy—changes from age to age through both obvious and latent causes.”

His bearing towards theological questions was largely decided, as he tells us, by his own religious experience, and by the controversies which in his early life were raging around him:

“In the first place, let me say that my early religious experience has colored all my life. I was sympathetic by nature, I was loving, I was mercurial, I was versatile, I was imaginative. I was not a poet executively, but sympathetically I was in union with the whole universal life and beauty of God’s world and with all human life. My earliest religious training was at home. My father’s public teaching may be called alleviated Calvinism. Even under that the iron entered my soul. There were days and weeks in which the pall of death over the universe could not have made it darker to my eyes than those in which I thought: ‘If you are elected you will be saved, and if you are not elected you will be damned, and there is no hope for you.’ I wanted to be a Christian. I went about longing for God as a lamb bleating longs for its mother’s udder, and I stood imprisoned behind those iron bars: ‘It is all decreed. It is all fixed. If you are elected you will be saved anyhow; if you are not elected you will perish.’ While in that state, and growing constantly and warmly in sympathy with my father, in taking sides with orthodoxy that was in battle in Boston with Unitarianism, I learned of him all the theology that was current at that time. In the quarrels also between Andover and East Windsor and New Haven and Princeton—I was at home in all these distinctions. I got the doctrines just like a row of pins on a paper of pins. I knew them as a soldier knows his weapons. I could get them in battle array. I went from my college life immediately to the West, and there I fell into another fuliginous Christian atmosphere when the Old School and the New School Presbyterians were wrangling, and the 605Church was split, and split on the rock of slavery, and my father was tried for believing that a man could obey the commandments of God, and Dr. Wilson was contending against him in church courts that men had no ability, either moral or physical, to obey God; and the line of division ran all through the State, and there was that tremendous whirl of Old School theology, old Calvinism and new Calvinism, and by the time I got away from the theological seminary I was so sick—no tongue can tell how sick I was of the whole medley. How I despised and hated this abyss of whirling controversies that seemed to me to be filled with all manner of evil things, of everything, indeed, but Christ! And then on one memorable day, whose almost every cloud I remember, whose high sun and glowing firmament and waving trees are vivid yet, there arose before me, as if an angel had descended, a revelation of Christ as being God, because He knew how to love a sinner; not that He would love me when I was true and perfect, but because I was so wicked that I should die if He did not give Himself to me, and so inconstant that I never should be steadfast—as if He were saying to me: ‘Because you are sinful I am yours.’ Before that thought of a God who sat in the centre and seat of power, that He might bring glory and restoration to everything that needed Him, I bowed down in my soul, and from that hour to this it has been my very life to love and to serve the all-helping and pitiful God.” This was addressed to the association of which he was a member.

One who was present wrote that while he was saying this “he seemed to lose consciousness of his audience; his voice, although clear and distinct, became low and gentle; he was carried away by one of those very inspirations which he was describing; and when he spoke of the revelation of Christ to himself, as one who loved men because they needed love, his face underwent a marvellous change: it seemed transparent with a radiant light, like a sunset glow on the Alps, while rapid and instantaneous changes of expression passed over it, such as can only be compared to heat-lightning silently playing over the golden clouds of a summer evening.”

From this living experience there came into existence an order of truths. “As I went on, and more and more tried to preach Christ, the clouds broke away and I began to have a distinct system in my own mind.” There grew up also a very 606decided dislike and oppugnance to much of the theology that was then in vogue, for it seemed to stand in the way of men instead of helping them:

“I dedicated myself, not to be a fisher of ideas, nor of books, nor of sermons, but a fisher of men, and in this work I very soon came to the point in which I felt dissatisfied with the views of God that had been before given. I felt dissatisfied with that whole realm of theology which I now call the machinery of religion, which has in it some truth, and I would it had more. But I came to have this feeling, that it stood in the way of sinful men. I found men in distress, in peril of soul, on account of views which I did not believe were true, or, if true, not in any such proportion. If you want to know why I have been fierce against theology, that is it: because I thought with Mary, and I said time and again, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.’ It seemed to me that men could not believe in such a God as I heard preached about, that men could not believe such a schedule of truth as I had seen crystallized and promoted among men. I do not care the turn of my hand about a man’s philosophy; I do not care about one system or another; any system that will bring a man from darkness to faith and love I will tolerate; and any system that lets down the curtain between God and men, whether it is canonical priest or church service or church methods, whether it is the philosophical or theological—anything that blurs the presence of God, anything that makes the heavens black and the heart hopeless, I will fight it to the death.”

But how about his orthodoxy? He says: “I hold there is but one orthodoxy, and that all others are bastard orthodoxies. The orthodoxy of the heart, that loves God, and loves man to such an extent that it is willing to suffer for him, and to endure hardship for the sake of the love it bears to men—that is the true orthodoxy, and there is none other.”

He said in an address given at a meeting of Congregational ministers in London in September, 1886:

“I think I am as orthodox a man as there is in this world. Well, what are the tests of orthodoxy? Man universally is a sinner; man universally needs to be born again; there is in the nature of God that power and influence that can convert a man and redeem him from his animal life; and it is possible for man 607so to bring to bear this divine influence in the ministration of the Gospel as that men shall be awakened, and convicted, and converted, and built up in the faith of Jesus Christ. There is my orthodoxy. But how about the Trinity? I do not understand it, but I accept it. If anybody else understands it I have not met him yet; but it seems to me that that is the easiest way of rendering the different testimonies or words of truth in the New Testament, neither do I see any philosophical objection to it at all, and I accept it without questioning. What about original sin? There has been so much actual transgression that I have not had time to go back on to that. On what grounds may a man hope? On the atonement of Christ? Yes, if you want to interpose that word, atonement, on that ground, unquestionably, I am accustomed to say Christ saves men. But how? That is His look-out, not mine. I think that because the nature of God is sanative, God is love. ‘If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good gifts to them which ask Him?’ If you choose to fix it in this way, and say that Christ saw it possible to do thus and so, and that was the atonement He made—if you take any comfort in it, I shall not quarrel with you. But it is enough for me to know this, that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, has proclaimed, to whosoever will, health, life, new life—‘born again.’ He has offered these, and therefore I no more want to question how he does it than a sick man questions the doctor before he takes a pill. If he says, ‘Doctor, what is in it?’ the doctor says, ‘Take it and you will find out what is in it.’ If men think I am heterodox because I do not believe this, that, and the other explanation of the atonement of Jesus Christ, it is enough for me to say I believe in Christ, and I believe Christ is atonement. Now, if you ask me whether I believe in the divinity of Christ, I do not believe in anything else. Let a man stand and look at the sun, then ask him what he sees beside. Nothing: it blinds him. There is nothing else to me when I am thinking of God: it fills the whole sphere, the heaven of heavens, and the whole earth and all time; and out of that boundlessness of love and that infiniteness of divine faculty and capacity it seems to me that He is, to my thought, what summer is when I see it marching on after the cold winter is over. I know where the light comes from and where the warmth comes from. When I see anything 608going on for good and for the staying of evil I know it is the Sun of Righteousness, and the name to me is Jesus—every time Jesus. For Him I live, for Him I love, for Him I labor, for Him I rejoice in my remaining strength, for Him I thank God that I have yet so much in me that can spend and be spent for the only one great cause, which should lift itself above every other cause in this whole world.”

Concerning one other doctrine, future punishment, he states his belief as follows:

“I have my own philosophical theories about the future life; but what is revealed to my mind is simply this: The results of a man’s conduct reach over into the other world on those that are persistently and inexcusably wicked, and man’s punishment in the life to come is of such a nature and of such dimensions as ought to alarm any man and put him off from the dangerous ground and turn him toward safety. I do not think we are authorized by the Scriptures to say that it is endless in the sense in which we ordinarily employ that term. So much for that, and that is the extent of my authoritative teaching on that subject.”

From his life-long interest in material science it may well be supposed that he watched the development of the theory of evolution with the greatest eagerness. It was not, in substance, unknown to him:

“Slowly, and through a whole fifty years, I have been under the influence, first obscurely, imperfectly, of the great doctrine of evolution. In my earliest preaching I discerned that the kingdom of heaven is a leaven, not only in the individual soul but in the world; the kingdom is as a grain of mustard-seed. I was accustomed to call my crude notion a seminal theory of the kingdom of God in this world. Later I began to feel that science had struck a larger view, and that this unfolding of seed and blade and ear in spiritual things was but one application of a great cosmic doctrine which underlay God’s methods in universal creation, and was notably to be seen in the whole development of human society and human thought. That great truth—through patient accumulations of fact, and marvellous intuitions of reason, and luminous expositions of philosophic relation, by men trained in observation, in thinking, and in expression—has now become accepted throughout the scientific world. Certain parts of it yet are in dispute, but substantially it is the doctrine 609of the scientific world. And that it will furnish—nay, is already bringing—to the aid of religious truth as set forth in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ a new and powerful aid, fully in line with other marked developments of God’s providence in this His world, I fervently believe.”

He had great hope from the influence he felt certain it would exert:

“The theology that is rising upon the horizon will still rise. I cannot hope that it will be the perfect theology, but it will be a regenerated one, and I think far more powerful than the old—a theology of hope, and of love, which shall cast out fear. Nay, more, it is to be a theology that will run nearer to the spirit and form of Christ’s own teachings, He who found the tenderness of Divine Providence in the opening lilies of the field, and the mighty power of God’s kingdom in the unfolding of germ and leaf and fruit.”

Mr. Beecher’s view of ordinances was in harmony with his practical view of preaching and of theology. To his mind the ordinance was appointed by God because it helped men, and was to be continued on that same ground, and the form best suited to that end was the one he adopted. The form of church government and of administration of ordinances was left uncertain, because it was to be adapted to the peculiar conditions of the times or the circumstances of people. It was of principle rather than of rule. It was the expression of the new life rather than of any artificial arrangement. Hence he believed that different forms of church government and different methods of administering ordinances were equally Scriptural, and to be adopted without controversy if they secured the end in view—the bringing into and training up of men in Christ Jesus—and equally antagonistic to the New Testament view when they were a mere form.

But of this he himself has spoken somewhat at length:

“Now, there is one more thing that I want to say something about—that is, church economy, ordination, and ordinance. I regard it as true that there is laid down in the New Testament no form of church government whatever nor of church ordinance—none. Paul did not see the outlines of the Church; they grew, they developed out of the nature of things. And so I say, in regard to all church worship, that is the best form of church economy that in the long run helps men to be the best Christians. 610Whatever thing is found when applied to human nature to do good, that is God’s ordinance. If there are any men that worship God through the Roman Catholic Church—and there are—I say this in regard to them: ‘I cannot, but you can; God bless you!’ In that great, venerable church there is Gospel enough to save any man, no man need perish for want of light and truth in that system; and yet what an economy it is, what an organization, what burdens, and how many lurking mischiefs that temptation will bring out! I could never be a Roman Catholic, but I could be a Christian in a Roman Catholic Church; I could serve God there. I believe in the Episcopacy—for those that want it. Let my tongue forget its cunning if I ever speak a word adverse to that church that brooded my mother, and now broods some of the nearest blood kindred I have on earth. It is a man’s own fault if he do not find salvation in the teachings and worship of the great Episcopal body of the world. I was for ten years a member of the Presbyterian Church, for I swore to the Confession of Faith; but at that time my beard had not grown. The rest of the Book of Worship has great wisdom in it, and, rather than not have any brotherhood, I would be a Presbyterian again if they would not oblige me to swear to the Confession of Faith. On the other hand, my birthright is in the Congregational Church. I was born in it, it exactly agreed with my temperament and my ideas; and it does yet, for although it is in many respects slow-moulded, although in many respects it has not the fascinations in its worship that belong to the high ecclesiastical organizations, though it makes less for the eye and less for the ear, and more for the reason and the emotions, though it has therefore slender advantages, it has this: that it does not take men because they are weak and crutch them up upon its worship, and then just leave them as weak after forty years as they were when it found them. A part of its very idea is so to meet the weakness of men as that they shall grow stronger; to preach the truth and then wait till they are able to seize that truth and live by it. It works slowly, but I tell you that when it has finished its work it makes men in the community.”

“I immerse, I sprinkle, and I have in some instances poured, and I never saw there was any difference in the Christianity that was made. They have all, for that matter, come out so that I should not know which was immersed or which was sprinkled.

611“The unity of Christians does not depend upon similarity of ordinance or methods of worship. It is a hard business. I do not believe the millennium will see one sect, one denomination, any more than the perfection of civilization will see only one great phalanstery, one family. The man on this side of the street keeps house in one way, and the man over on the other side keeps house in another. They do not quarrel; each lets the other alone. So I hold about churches. The unity of the Church is to be the unity of the hearts of men—spiritual unity in the love of Christ and in the love of each other. Do not, then, meddle with the details of the way in which different persons choose to conduct their service. Let them alone; behave at least as decently in the church of Christ as you would do in your neighborhood and in each other’s families. I do not know why they should not concurrently work in all the great causes of God among mankind. I am not, therefore, to teach Congregationalism, I am not to teach the Baptist doctrine, I am not to teach Presbyterianism; I am to preach ‘O ye that are lost by reason of your sins, Jesus Christ has found a ransom for you; come, come, and ye shall live.’ That is my message, and in that I have enthusiasm. It is not to build up one church or another church, or to cry down one church or another. Brethren, we have been trying conscience for a great while; what have we got by it? About one hundred and fifty denominations. There is nothing so unmanageable as a conceited conscience. Now, suppose we should try another thing; suppose we should try love a little while; suppose we should try sympathy, trust, fellowship, brotherhood, without inquisitorial power; suppose we should let men’s theologies take care of themselves, and bring this test to bear upon them: What is the fruit of their personal living, and what is the fruit of their personal teaching? ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’ did not exhaust itself in personal thought alone. It is a good test for denominationalism, and whenever I find a denomination that puts emphasis upon holiness, where there is no envy, nor detraction, nor backbiting, nor suspicion, nor holding each man to philosophical schedules, when I find a denomination in which they are full of love and gentleness and kindness, I am going to join that denomination. But I do not expect to change for some time.”

His estimate of sectarianism was very low:

612“The selfishness that inheres in the very elements of sectarianism is radically opposed to the spirit of the Gospel. Love works from within outward. Selfishness or sectarianism works from without inward. One is centrifugal, the other is centripetal. The only difference between a pious denominational spirit and sectarianism is the difference between a cub and a full-grown wolf. You may baptize your wolf every year with what soft names you please; it is a wolf still, that will never cease to make havoc on the flock. As for ourselves, in all this tumult of men running up and down throughout the vast and misty realm of ecclesiasticism, we will none of it. There is a fairer realm, there are brighter skies, distilling selecter influences. We are well satisfied that this world will never behold any earthly force so great as the heart of man irradiated by the fire of Christ, and turned in all its warmth upon men; hence our prayer for our brethren shall not be for esprit de corps but for esprit de Christ.”

And so, wherever he was, we find him bearing one character. In the matter of rituals he grasped the reality, as he thought, and, looking at men on either side of him, asking, not surrender of principle, but charity. And all sects found that they had something in common with him.

In doctrines, while accused of heresy, yet, when making a full statement of his belief before the New York and Brooklyn Association, or the meeting of Congregational ministers in England, his views received the heartiest commendation from men of all shades of opinion; while as a preacher what multitudes of every class and of all sects have been brought together in Plymouth Church!

Among parties, except when in the very onset, it was the same. When the battle had been fought, not a blow more than was necessary to secure the victory, not an act for revenge. In the very midst of the war of the Rebellion, in 1862, as we have already mentioned, he said, “I think I never pray for the loyal States without praying, at least in thought, if not in utterance, for those misguided men in the South that wage this rebellion; and, let me tell you, I have a tender place in my heart for them.” And when the war had ceased he stood up for what he deemed best for their prosperity, at the loss, for the moment, of a great deal of his popularity at the North. In England he plead, with no tones of fear but with manly words, for peace between 613the mother and daughter. In this age of spiritual growth on one side and materialistic tendencies on the other, Mr. Beecher, born with an intense love for nature, given a surpassingly deep and rich Christian experience, and reconciling them both in himself, and feeling that each interprets and enriches the other, and both are unified in Him who is the head over all, became—he was raised up for that purpose—a mediator between the deepest spiritual experience and the most advanced stage of real science.

One scene illustrates his true position—the place he has held between many diversities, and the one that we are sure will be more and more recognized as his as the years go by. It was when the delegates from England were presenting their credentials to the National Council of Congregationalists in Boston, at about the close of the war. There was a very sore feeling in the hearts of many of the loyal people of the North at the position of antagonism that their brethren in England and Wales had taken in the great Rebellion, and it happened that the delegates present had belonged very decidedly to the obnoxious side. The question was upon receiving them, and several speeches had been made, and it seemed that a very unpleasant result would be reached. At last Mr. Beecher was recognized and called to the platform. In a few words he described the situation, represented the failure of each side in the great matter of Christian charity, showed how grand an opportunity was given to illustrate this highest of Christian virtues, and closed by reaching down and clasping a hand of each delegate, while the whole audience of venerable ministers and delegates arose and showed their delight by cheers and waving of handkerchiefs. It was his rightful place, won by years of patient charity. Other names have been given him. He has been called Reformer, War Trumpet, Popular Lecturer, Preacher. They are all good, but we lift a name that we never remember to have seen applied to him, but which is his by right, which represents the resultant of all his life of toil and battle—the name which belongs to him as to but few men that ever lived—and place it lovingly upon his brow, while our eyes long for the look which he used to give: the name “Peacemaker”; and the familiar words come with a new significance as if spoken for him, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”

Love of the Country—Communion with Nature—Farming at Salisbury—Lenox—Matteawan—The Peekskill Farm.

Like the fabled Antæus of old, Mr. Beecher found strength by contact with old Mother Earth; not only that, but rest, health, and inspiration; while from the study of natural processes, in which he delighted, he gained a deep insight into the beautiful and, to so many eyes, hidden mysteries of nature, which was a never-failing source of comfort and pleasure to him through all his life—a rich treasury, from which he drew so much of that illustrative imagery which illuminated and beautified his writings and speeches. If Earth was the mother, Nature was the grandmother, equally beloved and loving. Nothing that came from her hands was uninteresting; each and every of her children found a true and faithful brother in Mr. Beecher, to whom in turn they showed that trust and confidence that opened up to him such glorious visions, such secrets, full of exquisite beauty, vouchsafed to but few among mankind. Of course he was fond of fishing and hunting. Not that he ever shot or caught anything: he was generally innocent of any such charge. He loved to tramp the woods, and stroll along the brookside, ostensibly hunting or fishing, but really communing with nature. The gun and rod were only for pretext. We take his own confessions:

“But, aside from the pleasure which arises in connection with seeking or taking one’s prey, we suspect that the collateral enjoyments amount, often, to a greater sum than all the rest: the early rising, the freshness of those morning hours preceding the sun, which few anti-piscatory critics know anything about; that wondrous early-morning singing of birds, compared to which all after-day songs are mere ejaculations—for such is the tumult and superabundance of sweet noise, soon after four o’clock in summer, that one would think that if every dewdrop were a musical note, and the bird shad drank them all, they could not have been more multitudinous or delicious. Then there is that incomparable 615sense of freedom which one has in remote fields, in forests, and along the streams. His heart, trained in life to play with jets, like an artificial fountain, seems, as he wanders along the streams, to resume its own liberty, and, like a meadow-brook, to wind and turn, amid flowers and fringing shrubs, at its own unmolested pleasure.

“Care and trouble, in ordinary life, and especially in cities, disturb the fountains of feeling, as rubbish fallen into the fountains of ruined cities in the East chokes them, or splits and scatters their streams through all secret channels.

“One who believes God to have made the world, and to have expressed His own tastes and thoughts in the making, cannot express what feelings those are which speak music through his heart. A little plant growing in silent simplicity in some covert spot, or looking down upon him from out of a rift in some rock uplifted high above his reach or climbing—what has it said to him, that he stops and gazes as if he saw more than material forms? What is that rush of feeling in his heart, and that strange opening up of thoughts, as if a revelation had been made to him? Who that has a literal eye could see anything but that solitary flower casting a linear shadow on the side of the gray rock—a shadow that loves to quiver, and nod, and dance to every step which the wind-blown flower takes? But this floral preacher up in that pulpit has many a time preached tears into my eyes, and told me more than I was ever able to tell again.

“Indeed, in many and many a tramp the best sporting was done on my back. Flat under a tree we lay, a vast Brobdingnag, upon whom grasshoppers mounted, and glossy crickets crept, harmless, with evident speculation of what such a phenomenon could portend. Along the stems creep aspiring ants, searching with fiery zeal for no one can even tell what. The bluejay is in the tree above you. The woodpecker screws round and round the trunk, hammering at every place like an auscult doctor sounding a patient’s lungs. Little birds fly in and about, gibbering to each other in sweet little detached sentences, confidentially talking over their family secrets, and expressing those delicate sentiments which one never speaks above a whisper in twilight. When you rise, the birds flutter and fly, and clouds of insects fly off from you like sparks from a fire when a log rolls over. The brook that gurgled past the tree, feeding its roots, and taking its pay in summer 616shadows, varied every hour, receives a portion of out-jumping fry. Far off their coming shines. But before they had even touched the water, that bold trout sprung sparkling from the surface and sunk as soon, leaving only a few bubbles to float down. There! if the trout has a right to his grasshopper, have I not a right to the trout? I’ll have him! After several throws I find that it takes two to make a bargain.

“At length one must go home. I never turn from the silence of the underbrush, or the solitude of the fields, or the rustlings of the forest, without a certain sadness as if I were going away from friends.”

Flowers and birds were his delight. Every spring he watched almost impatiently for the first arbutus, anemone, bloodroot, and violet, and enjoyed their short stay with an intensity that years increased rather than abated. The first song of the robin, the first plaintive note of the bluebird, and the sweet lay of the song-sparrow were each year listened for, and eagerly announced to the family with all the enthusiasm of early boyhood. Through the summer he watched and cared, with tender solicitude, for the roses, lilies, dahlias, and chrysanthemum, with the many, many other of the flower-world which he always had about him. And as each in its turn lived out its short span, faded, and fell, he watched the scattering petals almost mournfully, finding consolation only in the certainty of their return another year.

Each season with its many changing moods was a living allegory to him.

Spring was the young child just born, full of smiles, of tears, and winsome ways—the beginnings of life. Summer was early maturity, in which the first promises of fruitage were beginning to be fulfilled. Steadier and more sober, with increasing responsibilities. Fall perfected maturity with its full fruitage. Early winter, extreme old age, lingering at the threshold of the grave. Midwinter, nature’s death, which, like the soul’s, ends not in destruction, but only rests awhile to awaken into a more glorious resurrection.

Nature was to him God’s book wide open, each leaf free and unbound, filled with that which comforted his soul and confirmed his faith.

Not even in evolution, that bugbear of so many of his clerical brethren, did he find anything to disturb his trust in God, 617his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, or his confidence in the Bible, as life’s guide-book; but quite the contrary. He found his trust, his faith and confidence, strengthened and enlightened thereby. Many rough places were smoothed, many dark spots enlightened.

In it he saw the highest proof of God’s wonderful wisdom. A mind that could conceive, perfect, and put into operation so wonderful, so simple and yet effective a natural law, could only be divine.

It is not strange that, with his tastes and feelings, a plot of land to cultivate became early a necessity. While not exactly “brought up” on a farm, he was brought into intimate relation with most forms of farm-labor. The small plot of land around his father’s house furnished the field for quite a little practical farming. For in New England every one was expected to raise the greater part of his own vegetables, and the boys, as soon as they were big enough to run around, were expected to contribute their little quota towards the common good.

It was not until he was settled in Indianapolis that Mr. Beecher owned a plot of his own large enough for flowers, fruit, and vegetables. There he worked daily, finding rest from his head-work, fresh air, and healthful exercise, which would alone have more than repaid him for all expense or trouble. Rising before five in the summer, he was out in his garden when most of his neighbors were enjoying the sweet unconsciousness of their morning naps. Aside from the big dividend of increased health and vigor, he was further rewarded by unusual success in raising small fruits and flowers. His roses were a revelation to the community, and lent their fragrance to many an humble home or sick room. For fruit and flowers did pastoral duty, cheering the sick, brightening the dark side of life in many a poverty-cramped family; while the impulse along the line of taste and love for the beautiful, and the feeling of the dignity of honest labor, which he gave to the whole community, we are told is still felt, and will long be remembered as a souvenir of his pastorate in Indianapolis.

His contributions to the theory of gardening and farming in the Indiana Farmer and Gardener we have already referred to in an earlier chapter.

During the first few years of his Brooklyn pastorate he does 618not seem to have had the time to look about for any place in which to practise his favorite avocation.

Of course the crowded condition of city life precluded the possibility of having either farm or garden near his home. He was accustomed then to visit among friends a part of the time, spending the bulk of the summer in some picturesque place.

The earliest bit of country that lies within our memory was Salisbury, in Connecticut, where Mr. Beecher spent the summers of 1852 and 1853.

We remember well how, with the semi-savagery of early boyhood, we, with our misguided playmates, lay in wait for some frisky guinea-pigs, playing harmlessly in their little pen, and, after capturing a number, transported them to an upper veranda, and, in imitation of the ancient heathen’s treatment of captives, dashed them upon the stones below; and how retribution, in the form of a very indignant father, seized upon our youthful person, and, with the dexterity born of some little practice, gave us a long-abiding illustration of how dreadful a thing was cruelty. There also we obtained our first practical insight into a hornet’s disposition and activity.

Salisbury, doubtless, was a lovely spot, but its memories to us are not cheering, and we pass on.

In 1853 Mr. Beecher purchased his first farm in the East, a plot of ninety-six acres, situated in the town of Lenox, up among the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts. This was known as the “Blossom Farm.” It was justly celebrated for its fine fruit, especially apples. But it did not altogether suit Mr. Beecher, nor tempt him into any great agricultural outlay. It was too far from the city. He could not run up for a day, and back again. He could not be there in spring and seed time, owing to his pastoral duties. Six weeks’ vacation time in midsummer, with an occasional visit of two or three days, was about the limit of his time there. He had to run the farm by proxy, which was about as enjoyable, to him, as employing some one to eat his meals.

Having a chance, in 1857, to sell the place, he did so, and then hired another farm at Matteawan, just back of Fishkill Landing, on the Hudson River. This promised to be a more satisfactory place; but a little over two hours from New York, he could run up and back the same day, and spend many a halfday 619at work in his garden, from which he was debarred by distance at Lenox. This, doubtless, would have been his country-place, had not some happy chance led him a little further down the river, to Peekskill-on-the-Hudson, just at the entrance to the Highlands. There he found his ideal summer home, on the east side of the river, facing the sunset, but about forty miles from New York; the land rising by a succession of easy hills, terrace-like, six hundred feet above the river level, until one reached the farm a little over a mile and a half from the depot. Although when he first saw it the place was rough, but little cultivated, with gnarled and half-dead apple-trees scattered here and there over it, yet the possibilities were such that on the first inspection he decided to buy. So it came about that in the fall of 1859 he gave up his Matteawan place and bought the hillside at Peekskill, which he named “Boscobel.”

The Cottage at Peekskill.

At the foot of his lawn the turnpike runs along a level stretch for nearly a quarter of a mile; from the road the land rises 620on the north by a gradual, easy grade in graceful lines up to a comparatively level plateau, on which the cottage and the old barns were located, in true old-fashioned style, in happy disregard of either convenience or scenic effect. Taking a fresh start, the grade rose upward again for three or four hundred yards, forming a third level space on top, and then plunged steeply down into the valley of Peeks-kill. From the turnpike the private approach ran up between a double row of stately maples to the very doorstep. This hill was one of the spurs that ran back from the river at right angles to its course—a detached foot-hill of the Highlands.

With the exception of a few acres on the crest of the hill, the farm lay along the south slope, sheltered by its own crest from the north winds, its face to the southern sun. In this Mr. Beecher saw peculiar advantages for early fruit and vegetables, while the view in every direction delighted his eye. From the house, looking west, lay the river, visible only for a mile or so, and lying like a beautiful Swiss lake encircled by protecting mountains. To the south and southeast the landscape was varied and charming—low hills, woodland and green fields, making up a beautiful picture. Whilst from the hill-top, reputed to be the highest point in Westchester County, the country lay out like one great panorama on all sides, the view to the north and west being especially grand; another glimpse of the Hudson being visible just before it is swallowed up by the grim mountains of the Highlands. Over all in the distance rise, blue and faint, the Catskills, whilst to the east the country rolls in graceful, broken stretches for miles.

Such were the general features of the farm when Mr. Beecher bought it.

The house was a low, two-story, wooden farm-house of pre-Revolutionary origin, where, as the legend goes, that sturdy old warrior, Israel Putnam, had his headquarters at one time—a legend strongly corroborated by the silent testimony of cannon-balls, bayonets, and various military trappings from time to time unearthed by the inquisitive and grubbing plough. In the spring of 1860 Mr. Beecher took possession of his new farm of thirty-six acres, and began at once the work of reformation and improvement.

At first the low, scrubby bushes that, under the pretence of bearing edible fruit, had long been allowed to outlive their usefulness, 621were grubbed up and made into fagots for kindling. Then one by one the trees in the ancient apple-orchard, which Putnam’s patriots had, doubtless, many a time assaulted and carried by storm well-nigh a hundred years before, and which in turn took a sharp and colicky revenge upon their assailants—unless the quality of their fruit had greatly deteriorated in modern times—yielded to the axe, and in the generous open fireplace, the glory of the old-fashioned farm-house, paid their last tribute to their master, man.

The Old Apple-Tree.

The last to fall a victim to axe and fire, and then only when extreme old age and decay had ended its apple-bearing life, and made it a standing menace of danger to all who passed under its rotted branches, was one entitled to special notice. Mr. Beecher wrote of it:

“I have a tree on my place at Peekskill that cannot be less than two hundred years old. Two ladies, one about eighty years old, called upon us several years ago, saying that they had been 622brought up on the farm, and inquiring if the old apple-tree yet lived. They said that in their childhood it was called ‘the old apple-tree,’ and was then a patriarch. It must now be a Methuselah, and is probably the largest recorded apple-tree in the world. I read in no work of any apple-tree whose circumference exceeds twelve or thirteen feet. This morning I measured the Peekskill apple-tree, and found that, at four feet from the ground, where the limbs begin to spring, it was fourteen feet and ten inches in circumference, and at six feet from the ground fourteen feet and six inches. I am sorry to add that the long-suffering old tree gives unmistakable signs of yielding to the infirmities of old age.” Where the enormous limbs branched out, so great was the space, a summer-house was built, in which the children played keeping house.

Then the old ramshackle barns were taken in hand, with their successive additions hitched on, as more space might be required—architectural after-thoughts, regardless of everything except capacity. Some were torn down, others removed to more convenient and less obtrusive localities—the smaller buildings doing duty for carriages and chickens; the larger ones, with a little ingenuity and the aid of a carpenter or two, being consolidated into one commodious building.

Of course this was the work of several years, and required no little planning and arranging, furnishing that restful change of occupation, from the continuous and intense mental strain, which Mr. Beecher so much needed.

The surface cleared, then began the more serious work of subsoiling, draining, and clearing up of stones. Every inch of the thirty-six acres, save only where trees and buildings stood, was turned over to the subsoil. The deep subsoil plough, with four sturdy oxen to give it force, drove its steel nose twenty inches down into the earth, taking different parts of the farm in successive seasons, each then being seeded down to grass, grain, or vegetables, as the case might be. The loose stones, having first been carefully gathered from the upturned surface, were then utilized in laying gutters by the roadside, in building foundations for barns, sheds, etc., or in making drains—for he found that the live springs that filled the hillside, unless regulated, might make his lawn too damp. So deep drains were sunk across the lower half of the hill in different directions, which 623carried off the surplus moisture; while under house, barn, and cattle-sheds wells were sunk from eight to ten feet, furnishing a supply of cool, sparkling water, never failing in the dryest summer. With these later improvements began his real gardening and farming; every form of flower, fruit, and vegetable that the latitude would permit was planted and raised. Pears, apples, and grapes, among the fruit, might be said to have been his specialty; between two and three thousand trees and vines were planted, carefully watched, trimmed, and pruned year by year until they came into full bearing, while the smaller fruit, vines, and bushes became well-nigh innumerable. Though he kept the place always well stocked with what might be called the standard crops, he was very fond of taking up, for a year or two, several specialties, devoting his principal attention and study to these until he had pretty thoroughly mastered their habits, peculiarities, and capacities, then for the next year or two take up something else, and so on, gradually in time making a special study of every flower, fruit, and vegetable that could be grown in that latitude.

When strawberries were in hand he tried every variety, early and late, large and small, sweet and tart, and in such numbers that several hundred quarts were often picked in one day. The same was true of pears, apples, plums, peaches, cherries, grapes, raspberries, blackberries, as well as peas, corn, potatoes, cabbages, etc.

After one class of fruit or vegetable had had its turn, it was not neglected, but one or two of the varieties found best adapted to the locality were retained (except in the large fruit-trees, of which a large assortment was always kept), and only sufficient planted to supply the family with about four times as much as could possibly be used; for, unless there was enough of everything, so that each person in the family at the time might, if so inclined, make a meal of any one thing, he would not touch it. “Skimpy messes,” as he used to call them, were his utter abomination. But the thing that gave him the greatest pleasure was to beat his neighbors in early crops. Across the turnpike, at the foot of the lane, for many years lived a very dear friend, Mr. George Dayton, a gentleman of means, well skilled in every phase of scientific farming; and between the two was carried on, so long as Mr. Dayton lived, a most earnest rivalry on the subject 624of farming. Nothing delighted Mr. Beecher more than to gather a basket of peas, a large dish of strawberries, or a dozen ears of corn, the first of the season, that had ripened just a day or two ahead of Mr. Dayton’s, and bringing them down to his friend’s, deliver them to him, as, with an air of mock sympathy, he condoled with him over his inability to raise early vegetables or fruit; then, with a hearty laugh, invite him up on to the hillside to learn how a farm should be run. The natural advantages of his location, sheltered from the north and open to the first warm breezes from the south, generally gave him these pleasant triumphs by two or three days; though once in a while the tables would be turned, and he had to take his turn at being bantered and receiving his friend’s so-called charity.

We confess we used to prefer these infrequent reverses, for our youthful eyes watched regretfully the dishful of great, luscious strawberries going in triumphal procession to Mr. Dayton’s. We used to think that the first fruits, like charity, should be tried at home, and had to find such guilty consolation as we could in a surreptitious visit to the strawberry-bed. This was not altogether satisfactory, for aside from the attendant risks, the remaining berries would only be half-ripe.

At the same time he bought the place it was his good fortune to meet an English gardener, Mr. Thomas J. Turner, and to secure his services as superintendent, or “boss,” as he was known to the men—one of those simple-minded, faithful, hard-working men, who never spared himself, nor his subordinates. His devoted attachment to the family and the place—“Our farm” he used to call it—made him an invaluable helper.

For flowers and ornamental shrubs Turner had at first but little taste; his great ambition was to make the farm “pay,” and the contest for supremacy between master and man caused much amusement to all parties.

Turner was always trying to extend the borders of his pea and potato patches, encroaching on the hollyhocks and dahlias, while Mr. Beecher would crowd the corn and lima beans to make more room for roses and pinks.

How Mr. Beecher outwitted his opponent we will let him narrate:

“I am as set and determined to have flowers as my farmer, Mr. Turner, is to have vegetables; and there is a friendly quarrel 625in hand all the season, a kind of border warfare, between flowers and vegetables—which shall have this spot, and which shall secure that nook; whether in this southern slope it shall be onions or gladioluses; whether a row of lettuce shall edge that patch, or of asters. I think, on a calm review, that I have rather gained on Mr. Turner. The fact is, I found that he had me at a disadvantage, being always on the place and having the whole spring to himself. So I shrewdly tampered with the man himself, and before he knew what he was about, I had infected him with the flower mania (and this is a malady that I have never known cured), so that I had an ally in the very enemy’s camp. Indeed, I begin to fear that my manager will get ahead of me yet in skill and love of flowers!”

Mr. Beecher on His Farm.

In the years when corn, cabbage, or potatoes were being specialized Turner was happy. With a proud and beaming face he would drive down to the local market, load after load of choice 626vegetables. His cup of happiness would overflow when he returned and announced that “our vegetables” brought the best price of any in the market.

But, alas! like many a man before him, his pride became, figuratively speaking, his ruin; for after a while the fact was discovered that Turner was selecting the largest and fairest for the market, and that the home table had to be content with second and third rates, too poor to sell with credit. That ended all further farming for profit. From that time on nothing further was raised for the market.

As full of interest as every process connected with farming and fruit culture was, Mr. Beecher’s greatest pleasure was in the cultivation of flowers and ornamental shrubs. Their ever-varying form, their delicate perfume, and, above all, their abounding wealth of color, furnished him a bouquet of which he never tired. Roses were perhaps his standard favorites, and, whatever other specialty he might be studying, they were kept up always. Of these he wrote:

“All rosedom is out in holiday attire, and roses white and black, green and pink, scarlet, crimson, and yellow, striped and mottled, double and single, in clusters and solitary, moss-roses, damask roses, Noisette, Perpetual, Bourbon, China, tea, musk, and all other tribes and names, hang in exuberant beauty. The air is full of their fragrance. The eye can turn nowhere that it is not attracted to a glowing bush of roses. What would not people shut up in cities give to see such luxuriance of beauty!... The wonder is that every other man is not an enthusiast, and in the month of June a gentle fanatic. Floral insanity is one of the most charming inflictions to which man is heir. The garden is infectious. Flowers are ‘catching,’ or the love of them is. Men begin with one or two. In a few years they are struck through with floral zeal. And one finds, after the heat, and strife, and toil of his ambitious life, that there is more pure satisfaction in his garden than in all the other pursuits that promise so much of pleasure and yield so little.”

In different years he tested every variety of form and color which could be found in the single and double hollyhocks, single and double dahlias, phlox, geraniums, pansies, lilies, fuchsias, and chrysanthemum, sometimes massed in great banks of color, sometimes scattered in different beds and along borders, or in 627little beds hidden amid the shrubbery. From early May till frost came, “Boscobel” was always ablaze with the glories of flowers in their different seasons.

It is given to few to understand, and fewer still to experience, the wonderful effect which flowers had upon him. Fagged with hard work, vexed with cares, with nerves strained and irritated, a few hours among his flowers rested his brain, soothed his nerves, and refitted him for days of hard work. Doubtless change of occupation, open air, and the slight physical exertion required in tending his pets, did something towards rest and recreation; but there was a subtle power in many colors that worked upon his nerves in a strangely mysterious way, that gave him more relief from nerve excitement in an hour than any drug ever compounded. Flowers and colored gems—which he called unfading flowers—possessed this soothing power above everything else.

In his younger days his farming and gardening experiences were intimately associated with hard physical work. But after he had settled at “Boscobel” the number and pressure of his regular engagements made farm labor, except by proxy, impossible. He worked some, it is true, but principally for exercise; the real use and benefit of the farm being its sweet and soothing restfulness.

His description of his “work” and the unalloyed pleasure he found in “farming” needs no enlarging:

“The light is just coming. I do not care for that, as I do not propose to get up at such an hour. But the birds do care. They evidently wind up their singing apparatus over-night, for when the first bird breaks the silence, in an instant the rest go off as if a spring had been touched which moved them all. There are robins without count, wood-thrushes, orioles, sparrows, bobolinks, meadow-larks, bluebirds, yellowbirds, wrens, warblers, catbirds (as the Northern mocking-bird is called), martins, twittering swallows. Think of the noise made by mixing all these bird-notes together; add a rooster and a solemn old crow to carry the base; then consider that of each kind there are scores, and of some hundreds, within ear-reach, and you will have some faint conception of the opening chant of the day. You may not think that I wake so early, but I do; or, having awakened, I again go to sleep, but I solemnly do. I don’t think of getting up before six.

628“After breakfast there are so many things to be done first that I neglect them all. The morning is so fine, the young leaves are so beautiful, the bloom on the orchard is so gorgeous, the sounds and sights are so many and so winning, that I am apt to sit down on the veranda for just a moment, and for just another, and for a series of them, until an hour goes by. Do not blame me! Do not laugh at such farming and such a farmer.

“The soil overhead bears larger and better crops, for a sensible man, than does the soil under-feet. There are blossoms in the clouds. There is fruit upon invisible trees, to those who know how to pluck it.

“But then sky-gazing and this dallying with the landscape will not do. What crowds of things require the eye and hand! Flowers must be transplanted. Flower-seeds must be sown; shrubs and trees pruned; vines looked after; a walk taken over the hill to see after some evergreens, with many pauses to gaze upon the landscape, and many birds watched as they are confidentially exhibiting their domestic traits before you. The kittens, too, at the barn must be visited, the calf, and the new cow. Then every gardener knows how much time is consumed in watching the new plants. For instance, I have eight new kinds of strawberries that need looking after, each one purporting to be a world’s wonder. I am quite anxious about eight or ten new kinds of clematis, two new species of honeysuckle, eight or ten new and rare evergreens, and ever so many other things, shrubs and flowers.

“But what shall I say of the new peas, new beans, rare cucumbers, early melons, extraordinary potatoes? Do you not see that it is impossible for me, amid such incessant and weighty cares, to write? The air is white with apple-blossoms; the trees are all singing; the steaming ground beseeches me to grant it a portion of flower-seeds; by night the whippoorwill, and by day the wood-thrush and mocking-bird, fill my imagination with all sorts of fancies, and how can I write?”

After a number of years Mr. Beecher began to think that he would like to build a house that should embody his ideal of what a home should be—a real homestead whose hospitable largeness could readily accommodate all the children and the children’s children, and which in design, in finish and decoration, should be an education for his children. Several years were 629spent in talking over plans and examining designs proposed by architects before the final plan was adopted. Then the Tilton conspiracy broke out, and for a short time deferred the proposed building. But the need of some diverting occupation, something that should change the entire current of his thoughts, became so decided that in self-defence he began building the new house. On that peaceful hillside, amid the busy workmen, he found a grateful asylum and refuge from the tempest with which his enemies had sought to destroy him.

It has never been doubted in his family, that the relief which he found in the pure air, the beautiful scenery, the sweet communion with flowers and birds, at Peekskill, with his engrossing interest in “the house,” saved his life during those years when the burden was the heaviest.

He has often said that he never spent money more profitably than in building his new house and in laying out his grounds.

Stone by stone and brick by brick he watched the foundations and the lower stories rise. Each floor-beam, joist, and girder received his zealous scrutiny. The reasons for this, and the causes for that, he must know all about; until, long before the house was finished, he was, barring the manual dexterity, as good a mason or carpenter as the best of those at work. Every day, and often a dozen times a day, he climbed from cellar to ridge-pole, studying, investigating, making suggestions, or proposing alterations—these latter the terror of his architect; for, though often decided improvements on the first plans, they sometimes involved a serious modification of the work in hand. Every gentleman who visited him must make the tour clear to the ridge-pole, for there the view was finest. Once, when a young man was his visitor and victim, he insisted that they should mount the lofty but unfinished chimney to get a little more extended outlook, setting the example himself; but his companion, who was hugging a firmly-secured cross-tie, in momentary fear of losing his balance and falling, declared that he drew the line at the chimney, and would aspire no higher.

When finally the house was up came the internal finishing and decoration. Nothing was omitted that, in his opinion, would increase comfort or convenience; while, in the decorative and ornamental finish, he aimed at results which should educate the eye and tastes of his children.

630“Boscobel” was to be the family home, and ultimately his permanent residence, for then he used to say that when he reached seventy, he proposed to retire from the public and devote his closing years to literary work.

Here children and grandchildren were together each summer, pilgrims to this domestic Mecca. The house must be large enough to hold them all, and friends besides, without crowding; and it was, twenty and twenty-five being no unusual number gathered within its walls. And on one occasion, when a clerical union was invited to meet at “Boscobel,” thirty were, with a little ingenious packing, entertained over-night.

It was not until the summer of 1878 that the workmen were finally dispossessed and the family entered into the new house. What a sense of expansion we all experienced! We looked back upon the humble little cottage, hallowed by so many years full of enjoyment, and wondered how it could ever have held us all—something as a butterfly, with broad, expanded wings, might contemplate its empty chrysalis, surprised that it had lived so long, cramped within so small a compass.

The richness of the wall-paper and the delicacy of the frescoing would not permit the hanging of pictures, while Mr. Beecher’s love of the beautiful would not permit him to rest quiet until he had found some way of further decoration appropriate to his walls. This led him to the study of the various ornamental ceramics. China, Japan, England and France, Germany and America, were each laid under contribution for its characteristic productions. Fortunately he had made his mantel-pieces broad and high, with many little shelves and brackets, convenient resting-places for vases, cups, and bowls. Once the house was complete came the final work of improvement—the landscape, grading, planting ornamental shrubs, and laying out of his lawn, whose ten acres spread out before the new house. The trimming of trees and shrubs into fantastic or mathematical figures, and strict regularity of path and plot, he detested. Landscape-gardening should be only an assistant to nature, not a remodeller.

On this theory he laid out his place. In the changing of grades, grouping of shrubs, planting of tangled copses, he sought to give to everything the appearance of natural growth and formation.

The House at Peekskill.

Having taken up ornamental trees and plants, with his usual 632thoroughness he exhausted the subject. Every tree and shrub that with reasonable care could be made to grow on that favored place was planted. And so skilfully and naturally have they been grouped that, though there are over sixteen hundred of the ornamental varieties growing within the limits of those thirty-six acres, they are not crowded, and nearly twenty acres are free for grass, vegetables, and fruit.

It was stated by an experienced landscape-gardener, in 1884, that, with the exception of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, no collection similar in extent and variety could then be found in America.

Of course this building, improving, and planting called for a constant and heavy outlay of money. It was in part to meet this that he projected and carried out the series of lecture-tours that ran through the last ten years of his life.

In the commercial sense of the word his farming was not profitable. He spent upon his place many thousands of dollars that never came back to him in coin or currency. His receipts were of the kind not to be found in the open market, not affected by the flurries in “The Street”; neither defaulting cashier nor stock-jobbing speculator could depreciate or lessen them.

If money be valued at the amount of comfort and happiness it affords, then the thousands lavished on his beloved home were well spent, for seldom has the same amount given so much of real, healthful happiness, and to so many.

None outside of the family will ever know to how many “Boscobel” was a veritable tower of refuge in dark days and troublous times; how many found inspiration there for greater work, and increased courage for burden-bearing; whilst to Mr. Beecher it was an investment that repaid him, in dividends of life-lengthening rest, reinvigoration, and happiness, many hundred per cent. No wonder that he loved every spear of grass, every budding leaf and perfumed flower, upon that hillside. They were his children, at least by adoption. No wonder that the birds, and even the very insects, his uninvited summer guests, were dear to him; and that each fall, as he turned his back upon the summer and the hillside, to enter again into the harassing turmoils of city life, his thoughts ran back in gratitude to the many friends that had contributed so much to his happiness:

Hall in New House at Peekskill.

“Neither can a sensitive nature forget his summer companions, 634or stint them in their meed of praise and gratitude. Worms whose metamorphosis we have watched; spiders whose webs glitter along the grass at morning and at evening, or mark out geometric figures among the trees—spiders red, brown, black, green, gray, yellow, and speckled; soft-winged moths; gorgeous butterflies, steel-colored and shining black crickets, locusts and grasshoppers, and all the rabble of creaking, singing, fiddling fellows besides, which swarm in air and earth—we bid you all a hearty good-by. Sooth to say, we part from some of you without regret. But for the million we feel a true yearning, so much have we watched your ways, so many hours has our soul been fed by you through our eyes. Ye are a part of the great Father’s family.

“Oh! how goodly a book is that which God has opened in this world! Every day is a separate leaf—nay, not leaf, but volume, with text, and note, and picture, with every dainty quip and quirk of graceful art, with stores of knowledge illimitable, if one will only humble himself to receive it! One should not willingly be ungrateful, even to the smallest creatures or to inanimate objects that have served his pleasure.

“And so, to reed and grass, bush and tree, stone and hill, brook and lake, all creeping things and all things that fly, to early birds and late-chirping locusts, we wave our hand in grateful thanks!

“But to that Providence over all, source of their joy and mine, what words can express what every manly heart must feel?

“Only the life itself can give thanks for life.”

While house, flowers, and plants occupied the greater part of his farming time, they by no means monopolized it. He took a very deep interest in his chickens. White Leghorns, Buff Cochins, and Brown Brahmas, out of the many kinds that he tried, were the final favorites, and repaid him well in eggs—the universal hen currency—for his pains and care. Of these he wrote:

“It is a day for the country; the city palls on the jaded nerve. I long to hear the hens cackle. There are lively times now in barn and barn-yard, I’ll warrant you.... The Leghorn, of true blood, leads the race of fowls for continuous eggs, in season and out of season—eggs large enough, of fine quality, and sprung from hens that never think of chickens. For a true Leghorn seldom wants to sit. They believe in division of labor. If they provide 635the eggs, others must hatch them.... The Brahmas and Cochins have good qualities. They are large, even huge. They are peaceable. And the Cochins do not scratch—an important fact to all who have gardens.... But a more ungainly thing than Buff Cochins the eye never saw. A flock of Leghorns is a delight to the eye; their forms are symmetrical, and every motion graceful. But the fat, podgy Cochins waddle before you like over-fat buffoons. They are grotesque, good-natured, clumsy, useful creatures, with a great love of sitting. We keep Cochin hens to sit on Leghorn eggs.”

So long as he raised chickens in the good old-fashioned, orthodox way he was very successful; but when, one unlucky day, he fell into the hands of the agent of some patent chicken-breeding process, his sorrows began.

The hatcher and brooder appeared in due time, with trays, tin pans, heater, self-regulating thermometer, and enough other paraphernalia to hatch out an ostrich. Three hundred selected eggs were taken for the first experiment, carefully stowed in the trays, the heat turned on, the regulating thermometer put in gear; then we all stood back and gazed in wondering admiration upon the machine which was to grind out chickens like a mill. Our impatience could hardly be restrained to await the eventful day when the shells should crack, and the downy occupants come tumbling out of the trays; while visions of tender broiled chickens, chickens roasted, stewed, and fricasseed without limit, danced through our exultant minds. Three hundred spring chickens! Phew! And the process could be repeated indefinitely.

At last the long-expected day arrived when, according to the regulations, all well-behaved eggs should hatch.

Mons laboravit et—no, not a mouse, but one solitary little chicken came forth. Two hundred and ninety-nine good eggs had gone wrong!

The second trial resulted better: one in every ten responded at the roll-call. But even these found this cold world uncongenial, and, what with the pips, gapes, and other maladies incident to chicken babyhood, their little band rapidly diminished to zero. But these discouragements only stimulated Mr. Beecher to greater effort, determined that, if the machine could be made to work, he would make it. It would be hard to say what the 636upshot might have been, had not the machine, one fine night, started off on an original plan of its own, with a view to forcing the eggs, which resulted in burning the hatcher, chicken-house, part of a barn, and nearly cleaning out the entire general establishment. After that the hens had a monopoly of the hatching business.

With his cattle he was uniformly successful, no one having invented any calf-hatching machine. For many years he raised nothing but Ayrshires—very handsome cows and very generous milkers—but finally he began to try the Jerseys, and never after changed from them. Their beautiful deer-like heads, small, graceful limbs, and kindly dispositions made them universal favorites; while their milk, scant in quantity but wonderfully rich in cream, made berry-time a marked season of the year. As he never cared to keep more than six or eight cows, he had each year to sell several heifers; these, thanks to the kindness of Mr. Kittredge, his next-door neighbor, having been registered in the Jersey stock-book, sold for large prices.

No farm so well stocked with flowers should be without its bees; so about eight years ago he purchased four hives of Italian bees, had a proper shed erected, and the bees duly installed.

After a few preliminary experiments he delegated the care and culture of bees to our hands. The necessity of appearing in his pulpit at regular stated times, with a face reasonably free from distortion, compelled him to forego the pleasure and exercise of caring for and dodging bees. But if he found it prudent to turn the bees over to others, he none the less enjoyed watching his proxy, making humorous suggestions—from a convenient distance. Though he did not himself handle them, he kept himself fully posted respecting their habits. All that the text-books could teach he learned, and then would question us as to our actual experience. Whenever a hive swarmed he was on hand, if at the farm, and none were more interested in capturing the swarm than he.

As we have intimated, his bees sometimes showed a want of respect for “the cloth,” and an inappreciation of his friendly interest. At these times he joined as heartily as the less interested spectators in the laugh raised at his expense; for there seems to 637be something irresistibly comical in the sight of a full-grown man waging a hopeless war with a mere mite of a bee. His relish for the humorous could not be stayed even by the smart of a bee’s sting, while a little patience was sure to afford him a chance to return the laugh with interest.

On one occasion an enormous swarm had settled on the lower limbs of a cherry-tree, just over the place where an unconscious calf was tethered and peacefully browsed. By some strange freak the swarm dropped from the limb upon the unsuspecting calf. Fortunately, while swarming, bees are not apt to be aggressive. The calf, terrified at this crawling mass so suddenly enveloping it, began to bleat and rush frantically around as far as its chain would permit. The bees, at last annoyed at the shaking up they received, began to remonstrate in a very pointed manner. Matters were momentarily growing more and more serious for the calf, when one of the farm-hands, happening by, rushed in, with more zeal than discretion, trying to free the calf; before he could unfasten the chain the calf succeeded in entangling him, finally tripping him up and falling with him to the ground, a confused mass of calf, bees, and Irishman. Fortunately another man ran in, and, pulling up the spike to which the chain was fastened, released them all. Happily no one was seriously hurt, but the final rescuer, with face and hands still smarting, meeting Mr. Beecher, burst out, in somewhat incoherent excitement: “Those domded bees have murthered the calf, an’ Kelly’s kilt and gone to h——— the other way.”

Mr. Beecher was never able to get any satisfactory explanation as to what the “other way” was.

Between the Jerseys and the bees, Boscobel soon became a land veritably flowing with milk and honey.

No account of the Peekskill home would be complete without some mention of the dogs. Like all true lovers of nature, Mr. Beecher was very fond of dogs, and generally had a fairly large family on hand.

From Bruno and Jack, two canine giants—one a St. Bernard and the other half Russian bloodhound and half mastiff—to the little, wiggling mite of a diminutive black-and-tan, all bark and wiggle, through all the intervening grades of size and kind—mastiff, colly, Esquimaux, and terrier—one thing only was insisted 638upon invariably: the dog must be kind and gentle to children. He might be ever so homely, ever so useless, and he would be petted and loved; but if he once snapped at the little ones who tumbled over him, pulling tail and ears, the fiat went forth, as irrevocable as the laws of the Medes and Persians—banishment or death. He loved to watch them frolicking among themselves or with the children, chasing and being chased. With them he would take long walks, and often sit upon the bank and talk to the companion who, with ears pricked up and wagging tail, seemed almost to understand him. Of one he once wrote:

“I have a four-legged heathen on my place—‘Tommy.’ He is a most intelligent and a most discriminating little dog; he is a gentleman in disguise, and I am really sorry for him that he cannot talk. If ever there was a dog that was distressed to think that he could not talk, that dog is. I sit by him on the bank, of a summer evening, and I say, ‘Tommy, I am sorry for you’; and he whines, as much as to say, ‘So am I.’ I say, ‘Tommy, I should like to tell you a great many things that you are worthy of knowing’; and I do not know which is the most puzzled, he or I—I to get any idea into his head, or he to get any out of mine; but there it is: I know what he thinks, and he knows not what I think. He knows that there is something above a dog, and he manifests his canine uneasiness by whining, and in other ways. His aspiration shows itself from his ears to his tail. He longs to be something more and better; he yearns to occupy a larger sphere; but, after all, he does not, and he cannot.”

To the children “Boscobel” was a beautiful home, filled with everything that could educate the eye and taste, and cultivate the love of the beautiful in nature; made doubly dear by the daily association with our father in his happiest and brightest moods.

To the friends for whom its doors were ever open it was a delightful, to its owner a veritable haven of rest.

From its commanding height he looked out upon the country lying below and beyond, with the eye of ownership; for he used to say: “I own all I can see. I enjoy all that there is of beauty and peacefulness in my neighbor’s lands as much as they, without the responsibility or the taxes.” This, he declared, was the most profitable kind of land-owning.

Home Life—Love of Children—His Method of Training and Education—Formation of Library and Art Collection—Personal Traits.

To the public Mr. Beecher was best known as the eloquent preacher and speaker, the fearless advocate of right and foe to wrong, the champion of the weak and oppressed, a friend to all mankind. But it was only to those who knew him in his home-life that the softer and sweeter sides of his nature were fully revealed. For his home and family he had the deepest and most tender affection. Though brought up in New England, where respectful reverence from child to parent was often carried to such an extreme that the father was almost unapproachable to his children, he retained none of the puritanical austerity that largely filled the social atmosphere of Connecticut seventy years ago, partly because in his own home there was more of the feeling of fellowship between the father and children, but more especially because his intense love for children swept away all barriers of cold formality. To his own he was the companion and playfellow, the partner in every joy, the comforter in every sorrow. Patient in unravelling those mysteries of mind and matter that perplex the early life of every healthful child, he never answered their childish wonderings with the impatient “don’t bother me,” which too often checks that curiosity which is nature’s mode of self-education, and which often makes childhood one long, continuous “why.”

Every little prattler was his by love’s adoption. In more than a score of households he was the “Grandpa” par excellence, often sadly interfering, we fear, with the rules of government; for, by tacit consent between parents, children, and “Grandpa,” he was superior to all nursery regulations. His consent, and often co-operation, was a warrant of pardon for any and all pranks and escapades committed thereunder.

He was always very careful to exercise this power along the line of healthy sport, in little pranks that gave amusement to all, 640but at the same time leading the boys to be more manly and the girls to be more womanly. Many a young man and woman today looks back upon those bright days of their childhood with deep and tender affection, and sees where, in what seemed then mere sport and fun, they had caught the inspiration for higher and nobler living.

In this childhood’s Utopia things were sometimes strangely transposed. Nothing would at first more surprise a stranger, in whose memory still lingered pungent recollections of early discipline, than to see a troop of children pounce down upon Mr. Beecher, clamoring with shouts and laughter for a whipping. He remembered that shouts and clamor were constant concomitants in the execution of domestic penalties in his early days, but nothing in his experience recalled laughter in that connection.

The mystery would soon be explained, when, with mock frowns and assumed violence, the children were seized, twirled and tumbled into a row along the wall; and ordered to hold out each right hand; one after another each hand was seized and several blows administered—with a stick of candy. Of course the sticks did not get away. The rods were not spared, and we don’t think that any of the children were spoiled.

And the stranger, as with quiet smile he looks upon them, wonders, after all, if parents resorted to that kind of whipping more, whether the increased feeling of good-fellowship would not render the need of the other kind less frequent.

In the training of his own children he seldom resorted to actual physical punishment, and then only when the little culprit had been guilty of some especially aggravated offence. But when he did resort to the laying on of hands, he entered into it with great earnestness. Dishonesty, falsehood, cruelty, and meanness of every kind were capital offences. The sinner did not lose his head in such cases, but some other parts of his person were so actively stimulated, that standing became the most comfortable position for a long time thereafter. These little rencounters naturally produced profound impressions. We were not apt to invite another by repeating that particular offence.

We well remember some experiments in natural philosophy, conducted by us when about six or seven years old, in which a kitten and a tub of water figured prominently, some features of which, bordering on the barbarous, we will omit. Just then our 641father came along, and—well, things were generally reversed, including the youthful experimenter. The kitten was fished out, and we had it so thoroughly impressed upon our understanding that kittens won’t swim under water, that we do not remember to have experimented any further in that direction.

After these profoundly impressionable interviews he would talk earnestly and lovingly to the culprit, declaring that it hurt him more to punish than it did the sinner to be punished—which we can well believe now, from our knowledge of his deep and tender loving-kindness, and from the similar duties time has brought to us. Then it used to seem strongly paradoxical, measuring his pain by our still smarting skin we generously thought that we would willingly have foregone any benefits derived from the experience, and have spared him so much suffering.

Happily, these graver cases were infrequent. The minor misdemeanors from childhood’s restless carelessness were generally met with quiet, gentle talks, the mischief fully explained with all its whys and wherefores; the little penitent being finally dismissed with a kiss, honestly and heartily determined to keep out of mischief, and succeeding, by great effort, for an hour or two, until he tumbled into something else. With such cases the father’s patience was infinite.

As the children grew older he was untiring in his care that they should form those habits of body, mind, and morals that should make them strong, useful, and moral men and women. He stimulated their natural curiosity, but at the same time taught them to be self-helpful. If a question were asked that could be answered by any book that he had, the questioner was sent for it, and told, “Now read that carefully, and tell me what you learn; I want to know it, too;” adding: “Information which you get when your attention is fully aroused, and for which you have to stop and take some little trouble, you will be pretty sure to remember.”

“Never ask a question,” he used to say, “if you can find the answer yourself, but never hesitate to ask if you can’t find it: remember always you have a tongue in your head.”

His letters to the absentees at school and college were full of well-considered advice, and well illustrate what we have referred to:

“I am more glad than I can express that you feel so much 642interest in religious meetings, and I hope that God will lead you to embrace with your whole soul a religious life. It is the only way to perfect honor and to the highest truth and duty. Religion is only the highest use and regulation of every faculty. To love God and live in true benevolence toward men is the very way to make yourself wise, happy, and good.... In all your own personal conduct act upon conscience, and do not try to please yourself merely, but to do what is right, and because it is right. Towards your companions, in all things, seek to be unselfish, kind in little things, studying their good and not your own.... One word as to reading your Bible. You must not regard the book with superstition, and imagine that you will get good by merely reading it. You must remember that it is a very large and widespread book; many things will not be of service to you yet. It has something in it for every age and all circumstances.... Every day try to put in practice something that you read in the Bible. Remember that being a Christian does not take away anything that is innocent and joyous, but only adds to them higher and nobler joys.”

To a young friend who had much artistic ability, but who was discouraged because it was not of the highest grade, he wrote:

“Your note pained me for your sake, as it indicated a bad state of ideality. The sense of the beautiful and of the perfect was designed to stimulate and not to discourage effort. We are not to aim at the highest, but the highest attainable by us. Here, however, comes in that pride of which you speak, and which is unwise, inartistic, unchristian.

“Now, the province of art may be said to be to make homely things handsome, and good things beautiful.

“The power or the gift of the artist is not to glorify himself, but to make the way of human life smoother to tender feet. While, then, high art has an important function, so has decorative art. It is the democratic form of art—i.e., the form which allies it to Christianity.

“Washing the feet is not an agreeable but a most necessary act. ‘If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s,’ etc. It is the keynote of Christianity that one should be willing to serve, not rule. Christ ‘emptied Himself of reputation,’ ‘took upon Him the form of a servant.’

”You are not willing to do things which give pleasure to common people. You are not willing to make plain people happy, to make common homes more cheerful and beautiful. You do not join ideality to benevolence, but to self-adoring pride. If you could perform great works, you would be willing to toil, and even suffer. Being unable to do that, you are not willing to perform the gentler offices of art, the sweetest and most womanly, and give hues and colors to those homely implements that every-day life needs.

“If I had your gifts and your calling, I think that every day I should send thanks to God that, though I could not do great things, I could do that which would cheer daily human life, that would cast a ray of beauty along the homely path where the poor must walk.

“It seems to me that your eyes are holden, and that you do 646not see God’s angel sent to you, saying, ‘Will you not be a worker together with God, for all, and for the lowly first?’ You push him away and say, with bitterness, ‘Let me help the strong, the high, the rich, or let me die.’

“It is a wicked pride, and you must be born again, and repeatedly, until you can say to your Lord, ‘I will follow Thee in Thy poverty, in Thy humiliation, and if need be I will die to the highest ambition, that I may with my whole soul work for the lowly and in a lowly way!’

“Idealized pride.

“Idealized conscience.

“These are your enemies. They stand between you and your life’s work—between you and Him who died for you.

“I would never have taken the trouble to write this, if I did not love you so much, and did not hope to see you yet one day, ‘clothed and in your right mind, sitting at the feet of Jesus.’”

It was his idea that home should be a training-school for his children, by precept, example, and by object-teaching. Partly in gratification of his own love of learning and of the beautiful, but more for the training of the family and development of correct tastes in all departments of literature and art, he covered his walls with paintings, etchings, and engravings; when wall-space gave out, portfolios, drawers, and cabinets were filled with the choicest specimens of art that he could find—not with the zeal of a collector, who seeks the rare merely for its rarity, but because the thing itself was beautiful, or illustrated some type or period of art. As a result his collection of prints furnished a good illustration of etching and engraving, from the earliest rude woodcuts of the fifteenth century, through the various growths of improvement, down to the parchment proofs of the modern etcher. Dürer, Rembrandt, Ostade, Wille, Schöngauer, and many others, exemplified the old school, while through a multitude of the French, German, Italian, and English artists were traced the growths of modern art. All the wall-space that could be spared from the paintings and framed engravings was devoted to book-cases well filled. The ancient and the English classics were well-nigh complete, and every modern writer of note, in any department of learning, could find upon Mr. Beecher’s shelves the best of his brain’s offspring. As in art, so in literature, he bought nothing because it was rare, but only because 647it would gratify the higher tastes or could teach something. The student in any department of art, science, manufacture, agriculture, medicine, or theology would find in Mr. Beecher’s library the best authorities in his special branch of study, and generally with the marks of careful reading apparent upon their pages; while the professional man, whose life had been devoted to the study and practice of his particular profession, has often wondered how Mr. Beecher could have found it possible, with his many duties, to acquire a theoretic knowledge, in that branch of learning, so accurate and comprehensive. The solution of the mystery lay in the fact that he never had to learn a thing twice. The knowledge he acquired he retained. He was remarkably watchful and observant was deeply interested in everything that was going on about him; and when he became interested in a subject, would buy all the books he could find that would enlighten him, and study them carefully. He delighted in visiting workshops, factories, laboratories, studios, and all other places where men worked, there watching attentively the worker, and in a few probing questions reaching such facts as he had failed to find in his books—applying the precept he gave his children: learning what he could by his own observation, then filling the gaps by questioning.

While his memory of words, dates, and the like was very bad, rendering it almost impossible for him to quote accurately, or recall figures or dates, yet his memory of facts was wonderfully accurate. The language by which he learned a fact he could seldom repeat, but the information he never forgot. The former was only the shell; it was the meat of the nut alone that he cared for.

Of course in making up his library he bought many books which in fact he never used, for he said: “A library is like a bountiful table, on which each guest can find everything that he wants; yet it don’t follow that each guest must eat from every dish. My library is the table for my mind, from which I take what I want to-day, and from which I can get what I may want at any time hereafter.” His library was eminently a working library. Most of his books were bought when he was still a young minister, when economy and love of books waged constant warfare, of which contest we give his humorous description:

648“Alas! where is human nature so weak as in a book-store? Speak of the appetite for drink, or a bon-vivant’s relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings to be compared with those fantasies of taste, of imagination, of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller’s temptation-hall?...

“Then, too, the subtle process by which the man satisfies himself that he can afford to buy. Talk of Wall Street and financiering! No subtle manager or broker ever saw through a maze of financial embarrassments half so quick as a poor book-buyer sees his way clear to pay for what he must have. Why, he will economize; he will dispense with this and that; he will retrench here and there; he will save by various expedients hitherto untried; he will put spurs on both heels of his industry; and then, besides all this, he will somehow get along when the time for payment comes! Ah! this Somehow! That word is as big as a whole world, and is stuffed with all the vagaries and fantasies that Fancy ever bred on Hope....

“Moreover, buying books before you can pay for them promotes caution. You don’t feel quite at liberty to take them home. You are married. Your wife keeps an account-book. She knows to a penny what you can and what you cannot afford. She has no ‘speculation’ in her eyes. Plain figures make desperate work with airy ‘somehows.’ It is a matter of no small skill and experience to get your books home, and in their places, undiscovered. Perhaps the blundering express brings them to the door just at evening. ‘What is it, my dear?’ she says to you. ‘Oh! nothing—a few books that I cannot do without.’ That smile! A true housewife, that loves her husband, can smile a whole arithmetic at him in one look! Of course she insists, in the kindest way, in sympathizing with you in your literary acquisition. She cuts the strings of the bundle (and of your heart), and out comes the whole story. You have bought a whole set of costly English books, full bound in calf, extra gilt! You are caught, and feel very much as if bound in calf yourself, extra gilt, and admirably lettered.

“Now, this must not happen frequently. The books must be smuggled home. Let them be sent to some near place. Then, when your wife has a headache, or is out making a call, or has lain down, run the books across the frontier and threshold, 649hastily undo them, stop only for one loving glance as you put them away in the closet, or behind other books on the shelf, or on the topmost shelf. Clear away the twine and wrapping-paper, and every suspicious circumstance. Be very careful not to be too kind. That often brings on detection. Only the other day we heard it said somewhere: ‘Why, how good you have been lately! I am really afraid that you have been carrying on mischief secretly.’ Our heart smote us. It was a fact. That very day we had bought a few books which ‘we could not do without.’ After a while you can bring out one volume, accidentally, and leave it on the table. ‘Why, my dear, what a beautiful book! Where did you borrow it?’ You glance over the newspaper, with the quietest tone you can command: ‘That? Oh! that is mine. Have you not seen it before? It has been in the house this two months.’months.’ And you rush on with anecdote and incident, and point out the binding, and that peculiar trick of gilding, and everything else you can think of; but it all will not do—you cannot rub out that roguish, arithmetical smile. People may talk about the equality of the sexes! They are not equal. The silent smile of a sensible, loving woman will vanquish ten men. Of course you repent, and in time form a habit of repenting.”

When we consider how strongly developed was his love of the beautiful, we are not surprised at his fondness for music and precious stones. At first the two seem widely dissimilar, but to his mind they were only different forms of the same thing, and to both he was profoundly impressionable. Gems and precious stones were only valued for their color. They were color crystallized, and to color he was peculiarly and strangely susceptible. Music was color expressed in terms of sound. The one was color to his eye, the other to his ear. The mere enjoyment of sweet sounds and beautiful colors we can readily understand; it is common to all who can see or hear, in greater or less degree. But the marked peculiarity in Mr. Beecher’s case was what we might describe as their drug effect. This is not, perhaps, unusual with others in the case of music, for, with many, soft and gentle music will quiet the excited mind, soothe the soul, and bring peace where the tempest raged. This was so with him, but in a greater and more marked degree. Colors would produce the same effect. When disturbed or nerve-tired, or when, after some marked effort in the pulpit or upon the platform, he found 650his brain aflame and every nerve keyed to the highest tension, he would sit down in his study, take out from his pocket or table-drawer an opal, garnet, hyacinth, or flashing diamond, hold it lovingly in his open hand, drinking in through his eyes the soft, rich rays of color. Almost as if by magic, the turgid veins on brow and temple grew less prominent, the deep flush upon his face softened gradually into its natural color, the muscular tension abated, the nerve-strain relaxed, and a soft and gentle peacefulness settled down upon him, like the comforting shadow of an angel’s wing. Casting himself upon his bed, he would sleep as peacefully as a child upon its mother’s bosom.

A notable illustration of this occurred while in England in 1863. When he returned to his hotel, after a three hours’ struggle with the mob in the Philharmonic Hall at Liverpool, he found himself still under the excitement of the fierce strife, every nerve still vibrating under the strain. The waves of thought and imagination rolled through his brain, like the billows of the ocean still tossing after the gale has passed. He had been roused to the very centre of his being, and it promised to be a night of restless, sleepless tossings. He had with him an opal of wonderful fire and color. Sitting down in his room, he placed the stone in his hand, and for half an hour sat watching the play of its changing colors. As he watched, the stormy brain grew quiet, a gentle sense of physical fatigue and sleepiness stole over him, yielding to which he went to bed, dropping at once into a quiet, unconscious sleep, unbroken till, late in the morning, he awoke, rested and refreshed.

These color-opiates he always carried with him; a dozen of the finest stones were set in rings and strung upon a key-ring carried in his pocket; while in the recesses of some inner vest-pocket were hidden a number of unset stones, carefully wrapped in paper. His love in that direction was well known to all the prominent jewellers, who laid aside for his inspection the finest specimens of those stones for which he especially cared. One of these gentlemen writes:

“Mr. Beecher’s love for fine gems was neither on account of their value nor their rarity. He loved them because they spoke to him of nature and the God who rules nature, and this voice appealed to him most strongly in the specimens which possessed the richest colors. He might admire a perfectly clear diamond 651if it was unusually brilliant, but this admiration sank to insignificance by the side of that awakened by one possessing color. ‘How grand,’ he would say, ‘is that nature which can catch the hues of the rainbow and fasten them in imperishable stone! The rainbow passes away, the beautiful flowers fade, but in the loveliness of these gems are held permanently the colors of both.’ In one of my visits to Europe I secured a magnificent diamond, which I am confident has never been excelled. Its color is hard to describe, but I likened it to molten gold. I had no commission from Mr. Beecher to purchase anything of this kind, but nevertheless it was for him I bought it, knowing his taste in these matters, and consequently I resisted all temptations to sell it abroad, and brought it home with me. Mr. Beecher was delighted, as I thought he would be, and compared its hue to the deep reddish gold of a setting sun. This gem was set in a black enamelled ring, and was often worn by him—the only jewel I ever knew him to wear. He was as loyal to the gems of his cabinet as he was to his animate friends, and indeed the stones were also his friends. Rubies, sapphires, amethysts, topaz, hyacinths, aqua-marines, all were objects of his deep love, not alone because they gratified his keen enjoyment of color, but also because he seemed to read in them a page of the great book of nature. Neither was there any superstition connected with or tainting this love. The ill-omened opal was a part of his collection when the prejudice against it was strongest, and, in fact, Mrs. Beecher wore these stones frequently. I have said that richly-colored gems were his friends, and so they were, and more. From them he gathered inspiration, rest, peace, and even truth itself. He saw them, but he also saw beyond them. Their colors seemed to him to be one of those mysteries through which God speaks to man—a mystery in which his spirit delighted to bathe, and from which he seemed to inhale strength and much of that inspiration which all nature appeared to yield up to him ungrudgingly. His gems gratified his sense of sight, his sense of poetry, his sense of a beautiful nature, and, more than all these, his sense of an omnipotent divinity. None of them, that I know of, had any special history. He loved them for themselves alone and for what they might teach him.”

He used to say half-jokingly, but with a great deal of underlying earnestness, that it was the duty of every one to be healthy 652and strong; that weakness was the penalty which men had to pay for disobeying the laws of nature, sins committed either by themselves or their parents. Preservation of health was a prime duty, its waste a cardinal sin.

As he preached, so he practised; he handled his body as an intelligent engineer does his engine. He made it a matter of careful study. He knew just what he could do with impunity, and just what he must avoid. If he found that eating a certain thing harmed him, that thing he left alone. For the stomach was the furnace and must be kept free and clear; if that broke down, the whole engine came to a standstill.

He studied the effect upon himself of the various kinds of food and drink, and used them at the times and in the manner which experience and study taught him would give the best results.

Some things affected him very peculiarly, and of this he took advantage in their use. This was markedly so with tea and coffee. He found that coffee produced a mild kind of mental stimulus that made all things look brighter and more joyous; that its use before preaching stimulated the brighter and happier side of his nature, adding a slightly roseate tinge to all he saw. It was optimistic. While with tea the effect was the reverse. Objects appeared in their more sober, sombre colors. The rosy faded into the blue, and while it could not be said that he felt depressed exactly, yet the tendency was downward. Life seemed somewhat sterner, its responsibilities became more prominent, its joys less conspicuous. Tea was slightly pessimistic.

But, strangely, when he drank both, as he usually did, they held each other in check; he then saw both the lights and the shadows of life in their true relation to one another. His mind pursued the even tenor of its way.

Wines, beer, and their like he never used for pleasure or as beverages; as medicines, in certain conditions of stomach disorders, he found them useful. But then, as his library attests, he first carefully studied and investigated the peculiar properties of each that he used, and confined their use to the condition in which he found them most useful. For instance, Burgundy wine was used only to counteract certain tendencies toward hepatic trouble. Beer was used only as a substitute for the bromides to relieve insomnia.

653Writing to a friend, who had inquired anxiously as to the truth of certain rumors respecting his use of stimulants, he replied:

Careful as he was himself, he disliked exceedingly to have others looking after or inquiring about his health. If unwell, he would lie down, and in careful dieting and sleep soon find relief. On such occasions he preferred to be left to himself, undisturbed by questioning or fussing. If well, he repelled solicitude by jokes or humorous bantering.

Exposed so constantly in his lecture-tours (in one season travelling twenty-seven thousand miles) to the danger of accidents, and to sickness through unavoidable exposures, it was not strange that Mrs. Beecher felt no little anxiety for his welfare, and when rumors came back, with the usual newspaper distortions and exaggerations, her solicitude would naturally be greatly increased. On one occasion, when her anxiety, in consequence of some rumor, became too great to be restrained, she wrote an anxious letter to him, inquiring about his health and expressing her fears. She received the following characteristic letter in reply:

What a careful observance of the rules of health did toward keeping his body in thorough working order, sleep did for his brain. Every hour of sleep that he could get he counted clear gain; but even that was regulated according to the drafts made upon his brain. During vacation time, or when he had but little work on hand—rare occasions—he found the night’s rest sufficient. But on Sundays, while lecturing, or when pressed by mental work of any kind, he would supplement the night with a long nap in the afternoon. So long as he kept his health and had sleep enough, no amount of work tired him. Under such circumstances it might almost be said that his brain worked spontaneously; thinking came as easily and naturally to him as breathing.

He was spared the mental drudgery that oppresses so many men. His own illustration was that “some men are like live springs, that bubble up and flow perpetually; while others are like pumps—one must work the handle for all the water he gets.”

655His methods of preparation for the pulpit were peculiar. In one sense his whole life was a constant preparation, for he was always observing and studying, laying up stores for future use, seldom knowing just when he would utilize the material, yet sooner or later employing it all. His memory was a great magazine, filled with ammunition, on which he drew as the occasion required. This might be called his general preparation. Just before preaching or speaking he would enter into his special preparation, unlock the magazine, and lay out the material he wished to use. This he would do just in advance of speaking (his ammunition was highly volatile, and, if left exposed too long, was apt to evaporate and be lost).

His Sunday-morning sermons were prepared after breakfast, and the evening sermons after tea. He would retire to his study and think out the result which he wished to reach, making outline notes of the steps by which he proposed to reach it. He could never preach a sermon on a given topic unless it was in his mind. It sometimes happened that after wrestling with his subject in his study for an hour or two, and finally preparing a very unsatisfactory outline of what he wanted to preach, he would go to his church, and, while the choir were singing the opening hymn, the whole subject would come up before his mind in the form he wanted. Hastily tearing a fly-leaf from his hymn-book, or taking the back of his notes, he would sketch out in a few lines the new-born sermon, which would perhaps occupy an hour in its delivery. These were very apt to be among his best sermons.

Speaking on this subject, he once said: “My whole life is a general preparation. Everything I read, everything I think, all the time, whether it is secular, philosophic, metaphysic, or scientific—it all of it goes into the atmosphere with me; and then, when the time comes for me to do anything—I do not know why it should be so, except that I am of that temperament—it crystallizes, and very suddenly too, and so much of it as I am going to use for that distinct time comes right up before my mind in full form, and I sketch it down and rely upon my facility, through long experience, to give utterance and full development to it after I come before an audience. There is nothing in this world that is such a stimulus to me as an audience. It wakes up the power of thinking and wakes up the power of imagination in me.”

656After a speech or sermon had once been formed in his mind, if not soon delivered, it would evaporate and be lost. While he might recall it, it would be in different form.

When in the delivery, and the thoughts were surging at full tide through his brain, he became like one inspired, but half-conscious of his external surroundings.

The sermon once preached, and his mind quieted down to its normal condition, it would be impossible for him to recall or repeat the words and expressions that had but just left his lips. The general outline, the result, he could of course recall, but the language was a part of the inspiration, and left him with it.

His reply to one asking for a copy of a prayer illustrates this:

“You request me to send you the prayer made on Decoration Day evening. If you will send me the notes of the oriole that whistled from the top of my trees last June, or the iridescent globes that came in by millions on the last waves that rolled in on the beach yesterday, or a segment of the rainbow of last week, or the perfume of the first violet that blossomed last May, I will also send you the prayer that rose to my lips with the occasion, and left me for ever. I hope it went heavenward and was registered there, in which case the only record of it will be found in heaven.”

The thought and labor necessary to keep up with his duties as pastor, editor, and lecturer would seem to have been enough to tax to the uttermost his time and strength. But, by a kind of selfish blindness, the general public seemed wholly unconscious of the value of his time. By post or in person, an unending stream poured in upon him, seeking everything that human ingenuity or perversity could suggest.

Begging for help in every conceivable form. One wanted three thousand dollars to lift the mortgage from his farm. A clergyman in distress asked for a thousand, saying that the Lord would repay it. A young theologian asked that Mr. Beecher would write him a lecture that he might deliver, and from its proceeds pay his education for the ministry. A school-girl requested that he write for her a composition, suggesting the topic and briefly outlining the way she wished it treated. Another came in person from a distant State, requesting that he adopt and educate her; as she had exhausted her means coming on, he had to pay her fare back. One man, who had discovered 657the locality of Captain Kidd’s treasures, wanted him to bear the expense of their exhumation, the profits to be divided. These are a few actual incidents in the line of begging letters.

He has described the callers:

“It is six o’clock in the morning. The day is begun. The family are emerging. Breakfast will be ready in half an hour. You look for the Tribune. The bell rings. A man has called thus early for fear you might be out. You despatch his business. Sitting down to breakfast, the bell rings, and the servant says the man will wait. But what pleasure can one have at a meal with a man upstairs waiting for him, and the consciousness of it hastening the coffee and the toast on their way? You run up. Can you marry a couple at so-and-so? That is settled. Prayers are had with the family. The bell rings once, twice, three times. When you rise there are five persons waiting for you in the front parlor. A young man from the country wishes your name on his circular for a school. A young woman, in failing health by confinement to sewing, does not know what to do; behind in rent; cannot get away to the country; does not wish charity, only wishes some one to enable her to break away from a state of things that will in six months kill her. Another calls to inquire after a friend of whom he has lost sight. While you are attending to these the bell is active, and other persons take the place of those who go. A poor slave-mother wants to buy her son’s wife out of slavery. A kind woman calls in behalf of a boarder who is out of place, desponding, will throw himself away if he cannot get some means of livelihood. Another calls to know if I will not visit a poor family in great distress in ——— Street. A good and honest-looking man comes next; is out of work, has ‘heard that your “riverince” is a kind man,’ etc. Another man wants to get his family out from Ireland; can pay half, if some one will intercede with ship-owners to trust him the balance. A stranger has died, and a sexton desires a clergyman’s services. Several persons desire religious conversation. It is after ten o’clock. A moment’s lull. You catch your hat and run out. Perhaps you have forgotten some appointment. You betake yourself to your study, not a little flurried by the contrariety of things which you have been considering. You return to dine. There are five or six persons waiting for you. At tea you find others also, with their divers necessities.

658“This is not overdrawn, and for months of the year it is far underdrawn. There is no taxation compared to incessant various conversation with people for whom you must think, devise, and for whose help you feel yourself often utterly incompetent.”

Half of his life-work would have been left undone had he attempted to have given the letters and callers his personal attention. All that related to his pastoral duties, and much besides, he attended to personally. The rest he turned over to his wife. If his life has been a benefit to mankind, then the world owes a heavy debt of gratitude to her for the self-sacrificing protection she afforded him. She was his helpmeet indeed; nine-tenths of his correspondence she carried on. Few save his church-members and personal friends had access to him until she had first learned their errand, and determined whether the case was one that should be brought to his attention. Yet, with all this care, he seldom saw less than ten or a dozen callers each day while he was at home.

The drain upon his purse was constant, for he could hardly withstand a tale of suffering and want. Of course he was not infrequently imposed upon, as every generous man is apt to be. He used to say that the satisfaction of relieving one really deserving sufferer was compensation enough to make up for being swindled ten times.

Nor was his generosity, or its abuse, confined to those who sought material aid. Among those who engaged his affection and confidence, some there were who, Judas-like, turned against him when it seemed for their interest to do so. Toward these he never felt resentment, save momentarily under the smart of some sudden, treacherous blow. The love which he once gave to a friend he never forgot. He would be very slow to believe any one, once trusted, to be unworthy, and never lost a deep and tender feeling for such, even after he felt that they were unworthy of confidence. It was this feeling that led to no little criticism at the hands of those whose cynicism made trusting hard and hating easy. By these his tender, sympathetic trustfulness was called “gush” and “slopping over.” To their criticisms he replied:

“I suppose I do slop over sometimes. Well, I never saw a pan just full of milk that did not slop over. If you do not want 659any slopping-over, take a pint of milk and put it in a big bucket. There will be no slopping-over then. And a man who has only a pint of feeling, in an enormous bucket, never slops over. But if a man is full of feeling, up to the very brim, how is he going to carry himself without spilling over? He cannot help it. There will be dripping over the edges all the time. And as every flower or blade of grass rejoices when the rain falls upon it, so every recipient along the way in which a man with overflowing generous feeling walks, is thankful for his bounty.

“How to carry a nature full of feeling, and administer it without making mistakes, I do not know, you do not, nobody does, nobody ever did, and nobody ever will; so we must take it and get along as best we can. Life is a kind of zigzag, anyhow; and we are obliged to resort to expedients, and make experiments, and learn from our blunders, which are inevitable. We find out a great deal more from men’s mistakes than from their successes.

“But, after all, I am not sorry that I have been imposed upon, and that I have trusted men that were not worthy to be trusted. I am not sorry that I have been duped. It falls out from an abundance of generous feeling. It is the mistake of a disposition that I think it is a great deal better to have, with all the impositions which it suffers, than that kind of cold caution which prevents your venturing anything on the side of kindness, because you always want to be safe.

“I was much impressed with what I once heard my father say. His chance sayings have been like rudders to me all my lifelong. A man whom he had befriended, and done a great deal for, turned against him and acted very meanly. One day father came home very much exercised about it, and I expected he was going to blow out—for he shook his head in a peculiar way that he had when his feelings were very much wrought up. He said (raising his hand, and bringing it down slowly, but with great emphasis), ‘Well, when I have acted honorably toward a man, and he goes away and acts meanly toward me, I am never sorry that I acted honorably toward him!’

“Now, I think that was a sign of nobility.”

Plymouth Church, although the principal field of his ministerial work, was not by any means his only pastorate; he had a number of other subsidiary pulpits. Most prominent among them 660was the White Mountains. Such was his thirst for work in the fields of his Master, he made even his infirmities an instrumentality for good. For nearly thirty years he had been afflicted with that but little understood American malady, “hay fever,” which attacked him every year about the 16th of August, almost to the day. For nearly six weeks he suffered the torments of that distressing malady; during which reading, writing, and almost all forms of mental work were impossible.

Finally his attention was called to the exemption which the clear, bracing air of the White Mountains afforded, and, trying the experiment, happily found complete relief. The first year or two he merely rested, but after that he began holding, at first, informal services Sundays; then the large hotel parlor became the church, and every Sunday morning he preached. Soon the demand for more room crowded them out, and then one of the great tents used in the State fairs was secured, filled with benches. Here, during the last two or three years that he visited the Twin Mountain House, he preached regularly every Sunday during his six weeks’ vacation.

From the neighboring hotels and all the adjacent towns the people came by hundreds, filling the great tent. Each morning, after breakfast, fifty to a hundred of the guests would gather in one of the smaller rooms and join with Mr. Beecher in family prayers. To these he read a chapter from the Bible, briefly expounding its meaning, and then made a short prayer.

Another field in which he worked, widely different from any other, was the State militia. In January, 1878, he was invited to take the chaplaincy of the “Brooklyn Thirteenth,” as it was called, and accepted the invitation. His reasons for this step we give in his own words:

“It was not because I had nothing to do, and wanted to fill up vacant time. It was not, certainly, because I have any eminent military gifts, or what might be called a military spirit, by which I am led to delight in such things. I was as much surprised as any one could be when the invitation came through Colonel Austen, bearing the request of all the officers and all the privates in this regiment that I should act as their chaplain.

“After the surprise had a little subsided, of course my first impulse was to say, ‘No, I cannot.’ My second thought was, ‘Is it a matter simply of your own convenience, or is there a 661moral duty here?’ The question came, not exactly ‘Should you?’ but, ‘Why should you not?’ Is it not an eminently wise and proper thing for a body of citizen-soldiery to have a chaplain, and ought we not to be grateful that they desire it? Made up, as our regiments are, of young men in the prime of life, in this and in all associations of men, unrestrained and uncivilized, one might almost say, in the absence of woman, great mischiefs have often ensued from a relaxation of moral principle, a sort of vortex being formed, down which young men might slide to their destruction; and therefore it is a matter of importance that they should have a moral influence thrown about them. And when the request came from the Thirteenth that I would act as their chaplain, it seemed to me that somebody ought to answer their request; and there were some reasons why I thought I should answer it. I was forward in all those movements which brought on the war, and during the whole period of the conflict I did as much as I possibly could to bear my part of the responsibility; and with the end of the war, to drop the whole matter of our citizen-soldiery and show no more interest in them, to throw them aside as an instrument employed and worn out and no longer of use, did not appear to me wise or proper.

“Moreover, many of these young men belong to my congregation and to my parish; they were therefore in some sense my own sheep, after whom I ought to look; and I reasoned that if it was desirable to have a citizen-soldiery as a kind of background on which civil authority could retreat in times of great peril, it was eminently desirable that that soldiery should be moral, manly, expert, and in every way fitted for the high task to which they were assigned.

“Under those circumstances, because I am an old citizen here, because I have a right in some sense to be a father to the young men in this neighborhood, and because I very heartily believe in the formation of these centres of citizen-soldiery, I did not feel at liberty to shrink from the duty that was laid upon me; and I went with the hope and purpose, not simply as a mere recipient of courtesy, but with the feeling that I might be able to do them good—to do them good in the first instance as soldiers, and in the second instance as men.”

As their chaplain he preached to his “boys”—as he was fond of calling them—at stated intervals, and, as far as his other engagements 662permitted, attended at their reviews and public parades.

Of course his inexperience in military matters led to many amusing incidents.

Being a capital horseman, he found no trouble in maintaining himself in his saddle; but when it came to manipulating his sword, his troubles began. Then the path to martial glory did not seem easy. His first trouble was to get his sword drawn; once drawn, he was puzzled to know what on earth to do with it. He almost invariably neglected to salute his reviewing officer, to the great amusement of his fellow-members on the staff, who enjoyed bantering him. As one of his colonels remarked:

“His temporal sword was a source of some anxiety to him, and he always drew it with reluctance, preferring, as he said, to wield the more familiar ‘sword of the spirit.’”

Next to his sword the receipt of military orders bothered him most, leading often to humorous comments to those about him or to his commanding officer. To one of these orders he replied:

663On another occasion receiving a circular printed by one of the reduplicating processes then in vogue, but which was nearly illegible from the paleness of the ink, he wrote the colonel:

As chaplain he enjoyed the “rank and pay” of captain, and on all military occasions was addressed as “Captain Beecher.” A few years after his appointment, being at the New England dinner with General Grant, the latter referred to him several times as “major.” Supposing it to be a slip of the tongue, “Captain” Beecher said nothing about it. A few nights later they met again at some other public dinner, when the general persisted in calling him “colonel”; then the captain protested, but Grant assured him laughingly that the next time he should promote him to be general, “and if you don’t keep on going higher it will be because the titles give out.” We believe he never got above “general.”

All of those who were familiar with Mr. Beecher, either in the 664pulpit, on the platform, or in social life, are familiar with that moral courage which led him to face unhesitatingly an adverse public sentiment in defence of what he believed to be right. The preceding pages are filled with many illustrations of this.

His physical courage, though perhaps not so well known to the public, was quite as pronounced as his moral courage. Athletic, self-reliant, and in his younger days wonderfully agile, he faced the most threatening danger without a tremor of his nerve.

In his advocacy of the slave he daily carried his life in his hands. At Liverpool he faced undaunted an imminent danger, no doubt largely averted by the utter fearlessness of his bearing. But in more marked degree was his courage shown in an incident, never made public, that occurred soon after he settled in Brooklyn.

A rabid dog, with lolling tongue and dripping jaws, threatening death in its most frightful form, appeared suddenly in the street near his house, and fortunately ran for a moment into the area under the front-door steps of a neighbor’s house, where he lay crouching in the corner, with his glaring eyes turned to the doorway. In the street children were playing; at any moment, the impulse to spring out might seize the beast. Seeing the danger, Mr. Beecher sprang instantly to the area-door, within less than four feet of the crouching brute, and closed the gate. Stepping back to his house, he got his axe. When he returned the dog was rushing furiously around in the confined space, striving to get out. Raising the axe with one hand, with the other Mr. Beecher opened the area-door, and as the dog sprang at him struck him dead with one blow.

1886—England Revisited—Speaking in the City Temple—Westminster Abbey—Lecturing through Great Britain—Addressing the Theological Students at City Temple—“Life of Christ”—Sickness—Rest.

For several years before his death earnest efforts were made to induce Mr. Beecher to revisit England. His manly fight against such odds, in 1863, had quite captured the heart of the English people, who always have a tender feeling for a good fighter.

What began as admiration steadily grew and deepened into affection. His sermons, his writings, and even the meagre reports of lectures and speeches, were eagerly read—quite as much so in England as in America.

And when the great cloud of scandal loomed up in 1873-6, none were any more steadfast and loyal in love and confidence than the friends in old England. Among the many testimonials treasured by his family are the resolutions of sympathy and confidence received from clerical associations in England, Scotland, Wales, and even from the distant provinces.

With each succeeding year the importunities that he should spend a summer in England increased, until, in the early spring of 1886, he finally decided to brave the discomforts of an ocean voyage—to him no slight trial—and visit again his English friends. This being a trip of peace and not of war, he determined to take Mrs. Beecher with him. His decision was made the latter part of May. The next Sunday he made the announcement from the pulpit. On the following Sunday he preached his farewell. The church was packed, if possible, fuller than usual, the throng crowding around the pulpit-steps at the close of the service to say farewell.

He engaged passage on the Etruria for Saturday, June 19. The Friday night preceding the regular prayer-meeting night became a regular leave-taking. The services were over by nine o’clock, and from that hour until eleven Mr. and Mrs. Beecher 666were the centre of a circle of friends that filled the lecture-room and overflowed into the church auditorium, anxious to shake hands and say God-speed.

The Etruria was to start early Saturday morning, so Mr. and Mrs. Beecher went aboard Friday night.

Promptly at six o’clock the hawsers were cast off, and the great steamer slowly drew out from the pier, and, gathering headway, turned her prow eastward and slowly steamed down the bay. Almost simultaneously the excursion steamer Grand Republic, with three thousand friends—whose enthusiastic affection had called them, before the sun was up, to pay their farewell tribute—left her wharf in Brooklyn to intercept the Etruria in the Upper Bay. Just off Liberty Island the Etruria slowed down and the Grand Republic came alongside; her passengers, crowding to the nearer guards, gave vent to their feelings in ringing cheers. Mr. and Mrs. Beecher, standing on the upper deck, responded with hat and handkerchief. The band aboard the Grand Republic played “Hail to the Chief,” the whistles of the steamers saluted, and as the Etruria, getting under way again, forged rapidly ahead, the choir of Plymouth Church sang the Doxology, the sweetly solemn notes growing fainter as the steamers drew apart.

Going below, they found their staterooms literally embanked in flowers. One enthusiastic friend had left twenty homing pigeons, with instructions to release them at stated intervals during the day. To these short notes were attached, and borne back by the swift, home-seeking wings, being the last words to many friends until the cable announced Mr. Beecher’s safe arrival at Queenstown on the 26th.

Our space forbids an attempt to give more than a very general account of this visit; a full account of the entire trip has already been published, with verbatim reports of the sermons and lectures delivered by Mr. Beecher in England.^[18]

Mr. and Mrs. Beecher at Time of Visit to England in 1886.

It would be impossible in cold words to express the deep and tender feelings with which Mr. Beecher put his foot again on English soil after an absence of nearly a quarter of a century. Memory, swift-flying, ran back through the twenty-three years 668past, and like some grand panorama the impressive events, both national and personal, moved by his mind’s eyes in silent procession.

Slavery, that blight upon America’s fair name, had been blotted out, and the places that had known it, knew it no more for ever. The struggle for national existence, which had been hanging almost on even balance when, twenty-three years before, he had raised his voice in this same land, and pleaded the nation’s cause, had ended in complete victory and triumphant vindication of those principles for which he had contended. It was with no little pride that he was able to stand again before an English audience and say “that every single substantial sentiment that was set forth in those several popular addresses had now become history.”

Within that same period he had himself passed through the flood of a personal persecution which, for persistent and malignant intensity and unchristian bitterness, exceeded anything recorded in the annals of history. He had seen his name, his life-work, all that he had lived and labored for, threatened with black destruction. Through this he had passed, emerging safely upon the firm shore of the continued love and confidence of his countrymen. Nor could he forget the assurances of fullest trust that came to him from public utterances and private letters of the many friends in England:

“For no other nation except our own have I such strong affinities as for Great Britain. My ancestors came from there. I have been bred on its literature. I have fed on the thought and feeling of its heroic men. I am a child, though born away from home, of the English people; and God forbid that I should be indifferent to those throes which are to bring forth the man-child yet! I look with profound sympathy, with the feeling of a child that venerates a parent in distress, upon that people; and I go there with a heart as warm for them as it was for its own country in the day of its division and trials. Twenty-three years—and what a space between! Twenty-three years! Darkness, thunder, tears, blood, and war—they have gone, and the white mantle of peace is spread over our shores, and the fields laugh and rejoice, and the heavens are propitious, and the earth is bountiful, and men are growing more and more into manliness. What hath God wrought!”

669After a short rest in Queenstown, Mr. and Mrs. Beecher went direct to Liverpool; there on the 28th he had an opportunity to hear Mr. Gladstone, meeting him after the address.

The next day they proceeded to London, where, on the following Sunday, Mr. Beecher was to preach for Dr. Parker at the City Temple. On Thursday he attended the regular weekday services held in that church every Thursday, intending to enjoy the unusual pleasure of listening to somebody else’s preaching. But after the sermon Dr. Parker insisted upon his addressing the meeting and closing it in prayer. On calling Mr. Beecher to the pulpit, the doctor spoke a few words in tribute to his friend, concluding with the much-quoted sentence:

“My brethren, I am sorry to break in upon a man’s singularity, so that the palm may, even for a moment, seem to be divided between two; I am, however, constrained to violate the sanctity of a definite personality, and to say that last week there was in England a Grand Old Man: to-day there are two of them!”

On the 4th he preached for Dr. Parker, and on the 5th attended a dinner given to him by the lord mayor of London. On the 11th he preached for Dr. Henry Allen in London, and in the afternoon attended the service at Westminster Abbey, calling afterwards, by previous invitation, upon Dean Bradley, with whom were present a number of the clergymen of the Church of England, who had been invited to meet him. After tea the dean invited him to visit the various historical private rooms of the Abbey.

Many of the rooms were quite as familiar to Mr. Beecher, through his reading, though never seen before, as they were to the clergy of the church itself. These listened with intense interest to his familiar exposition and discussion, of what must have seemed to them to be their own peculiar province of history.

The “Jerusalem Chamber” greatly impressed him. “I am struck with awe. No room has greater interest to me, unless it be the ‘Upper Room.’”

He recalled with deep interest the many notable events that had there occurred intimately connected with religious history—the Westminster Assembly, the Confession of Faith, the two revisions of the Bible, etc. This was to Mr. Beecher a red-letter day, fuller of quiet, tender enjoyment, probably, than any other during his stay.

670On the 19th, as he said, his play-day being over (he had preached every Sunday, generally twice, and delivered addresses every week), his work began. At Exeter Hall, London, where he delivered the last of the famous speeches in 1863, he delivered the first of his lectures in 1886. From that time on until the 21st of October he lectured, on an average, four nights a week, preaching every Sunday. A letter home gives some humorous experiences:

“... You would be amused at the way of public meetings in England and Scotland. After the lecture the chairman calls on some one, previously agreed upon, to move a vote of thanks, which he does, with a speech in which he pours out such a flood of compliments that before he is half through you lose all sense of personal identity, and wonder what heroic personage he is talking about, and then he moves the distinguished gentleman a vote of thanks. Thereupon the chairman informs the audience that Reverend or Professor So-and-so will second the motion. He takes up the thread of eulogy where the other bit it off, and winds you up with golden cords until you swing high in the heavens. Thereupon the vote is put by the chairman, the audience raise their hands, and then fall into a perfect tempest of clapping; as this subsides, you are expected to rise and, with modest self-depreciation, to explain how much you are elated and how grateful you are.... But it is after the assembly is dismissed that the most serious business of the evening begins. All on the platform shake hands; women climb up and shake you; at every step downward a host of hands—men, women, girls, and boys are reaching; the hallway is crowded with men that pull you, shake you, hustle you; the outward passage is lined with scores and scores, and finally, on the sidewalk, the rush to get your hand is fearful, and the police have to crowd them back to get you into the carriage, and then the windows bristle with more hands, and as the carriage moves on the crowd run along by its side still fiercely pushing each other to get a chance to shake.

“A ludicrous event happened at York. Just away from the hall is a bridge, for which foot-passengers pay a cent and carriages two cents. A woman or girl stands out on the sidewalk, extending her hand for the fee. After I had shaken hands at the hall, along the street, with scores, we came to the bridge, hardly yet shaking off the crowd. A hand was thrust into 671the window, which I shook; the woman said something indistinctly, which I afterwards learned was, ‘A penny, sir.’ Thinking it some affectionate blessing, I took her hand again, and gave it a more emphatic shake. She put her face in the window and said, ‘A penny, sir’; Pond meanwhile sitting by and laughing heartily.

“Your mother, too, frequently comes in for her share, and you can imagine how comical she looks as, with a modest smile and some surprise, she deals out her ‘thank you’s’ to the host of admirers.”

From July 4, when he preached first for Dr. Parker, until his departure, October 24, Mr. Beecher preached seventeen times, delivered nine public addresses and fifty-eight lectures. This was his summer vacation. From this period of restful recreation, such was his peculiar capacity and enjoyment of mental activity, he derived great benefit; and on his return home, after a few days’ rest from the disturbing influences of the, to him, ever-unrestful ocean, he declared that he never felt stronger, or more vigorous, or better equipped for work in his life. In the course of his stay he visited and lectured in each of the cities, and generally in the same hall where he had “fought with the wild beasts of Ephesus,” as he used to say, in 1863.

Just before his departure he addressed one meeting which, on account of its peculiar significance, we must mention more fully ere we pass on. So much has been said of late in certain quarters respecting Mr. Beecher’s theology, so many criticisms upon his orthodoxy, that his standing among so conservative a body as the English clergy may not be uninteresting. He had already addressed the London Congregational Board, the Congregational School (for the sons of Congregational clergymen), and had preached nearly twenty times, so that there had been a tolerably fair opportunity to learn something of his religious views, when he was invited to address the theological students on the subject of preaching.

The meeting was held in the City Temple, October 15. Six hundred students attended, the remaining space in the body of the house being occupied by ministers, who came from all parts of the country to attend this meeting. It was understood that Mr. Beecher would, after the address, answer such questions as any might want to ask. As the hour fixed was eleven o’clock in 672the forenoon, all of the theological schools had to rearrange their school-hours for that day, in order to allow the scholars a chance to attend. This was done with great readiness. After an address of nearly an hour, he offered to receive such questions, pertinent to the topic discussed, as might be put by the scholars or any of the clergy present, and occupied the remainder of his time in answering them.

On the 24th Mr. and Mrs. Beecher boarded the Etruria at Queenstown for their return home, reaching New York on the 31st.

In accordance with his expressed wishes no attempts were made to “receive” him, but he was allowed to go quietly home and rest, his people reserving their welcome until the following Sunday.^[19] On that day the church was decorated with flowers and evergreen vines, the pulpit being literally a bank of flowers, which ran up along the face of the great organ, even to the 673ceiling. After the service his people thronged around the pulpit-stairs for one shake of the hand and one word of welcome.

Early in the winter he began to seriously think of completing the second volume of the “Life of Christ.” Friends and members of his family had for some years been urging that the book should be completed. A fatality seemed to have hung over that book.

At the time when the Tilton conspiracy first broke out he had written a considerable part of Volume II., and undoubtedly would have soon finished it, when that outbreak, with the church persecutions that followed, interrupted the work, and for a number of years kept his mind so engrossed in other matters as to make writing an impossibility. This was followed by the business embarrassments of his publishers, and then the care of reorganizing the Christian Union. At last, peace and quiet having been restored, he began again to arrange for the completion of the work, when a vexatious suit was brought against him by Samuel Wilkeson, who had bought the original contract for the book from the publishers at an assignee’s sale, and, claiming that Mr. Beecher had broken his contract, sued for $60,000. The pendency of this suit stopped all further work on the book. After some delay the cause was tried and the complaint promptly dismissed by the court.

Twice, after the suit, an attempt was made by Mr. Beecher to accomplish the long-deferred completion of the book, but on each occasion something occurred to interrupt and further defer the work.

Finally, in January, 1887, he determined to complete the book, and at the same time to write his Autobiography. No small part of the credit for this final determination is due to Major J. B. Pond, who for many years past had been Mr. Beecher’s lecture manager, and who joined with Mr. Beecher’s family in urging the undertaking of both works. Finally it was decided that he would deliver no more lectures during the year 1887, but devote all of his time outside of his church duties to these literary labors.

In February a contract was made with Charles L. Webster & Co., of New York—our present publishers—to publish both books. The “Life of Christ” was to be completed before July 1, 1887, and the Autobiography before July 1, 1888.

674With great zeal Mr. Beecher began at once to re-read, revise, and complete the “Life of Christ,” sometimes resting his mind by changing his work and writing a little on his Autobiography. In this way, by March 1, he had revised all of his former manuscript of the “Life of Christ,” and had completed it down to chapter xxv. Eight chapters of Volume II. were completed in this manner, and the outlines of the remaining three, within which space he intended to complete the work, were clearly blocked out in his own mind. As he got more and more back into the long-interrupted current of thought, his interest deepened, and with increased interest came greater mental ease.

Several times he remarked that he had never seen the subject so clearly and luminously in his mind before. It seemed at times as though Christ’s life were revealed to him with a clearness and a nearness that had never before been given him. In one of his exalted moods he burst out: “Twenty men could not in a life-time write all I now see; how can I put it into one book?”

But a few days before his last sickness an English clergyman called to see him, and after a pleasant chat, as he rose to leave, asked if there was any prospect of his completing the “Life of Christ.” Mr. Beecher replied that he was at work on it then, and would probably finish it in two or three months. The clergyman was greatly delighted, saying that he had been long waiting, hoping for the second volume. As the visitor left, Mr. Beecher, kneeling in his great arm-chair, as was often his wont when in a reverie, with one elbow on the chair-back, and chin resting in his open palm, gazed in silent abstraction out of the window facing him. Suddenly, his face lighting up, he exclaimed, as though thinking aloud: “Finish the Life of Christ! Finish the Life of Christ! Who can finish the Life of Christ! It cannot be finished.”

Prophetic words! Almost within the week he was called to that closer communion with his Saviour, and entered into that lasting peace for which he had so often longed.

During the day of Thursday, March 3, he was in the best of spirits and apparently perfect health. He had repeatedly stated since his return from England that he had never felt better, or better able to work. We had often during the past month jokingly called him the youngest boy in the house. None of us dreamed that Thursday was to end his long career of usefulness.

675During the night he awoke, complaining of nausea, and was taken with vomiting, but soon fell asleep again. Friday morning he did not get up; though he roused when spoken to, he would immediately after fall asleep again. These symptoms disturbed no one, as they were quite common whenever he had any bilious trouble. The family thought that something he ate for supper had disagreed with him, and that he was working it off in his usual way, by sleeping and lying quiet.

Friday afternoon the doctor was for the first time called in. He thought, with the family, that the trouble was with the stomach, though some symptoms made him think that perhaps there might be some other complicating causes than mere biliousness.

Later in the evening, when one of his sons called in, he roused himself quite fully, called for toast, complained that his feet were cold, and that his head ached some. When asked what was the matter, he replied, jokingly, in a sort of half-sleepy manner:

“I had a dream last night. I thought that I was a duke and your mother a duchess, and I was trying to figure the interest on a hundred thousand pounds a year—you know I never was good at mathematics. It gave me a headache; but I’ll have your mother boil a page of arithmetic and make a tea of it. I’ll cure it homœopathically.”

He was then helped to sit up in bed and eat his toast, which he did with eyes still closed, as though half-asleep. When laid back upon his pillow he fell asleep at once.

Saturday morning the dreadful truth first became apparent. Dr. Searle found that the left side showed unmistakable signs of paralysis, and then, recalling the previous symptoms, which had been attributed to other causes, said at once that it was apoplexy and that there was nothing to hope for. At first none would believe the diagnosis. Up to that moment all had thought the illness nothing that need cause any apprehension, when with the suddenness of a lightning-stroke came the announcement of utter hopelessness.

That no chance should be overlooked, Drs. Hammond and Helmuth, of New York, were called in consultation during the day, and confirmed the hopeless diagnosis. Nothing could be done—nothing but wait. The patient did not suffer; only 676those who stood about his bed, watching the beloved face, suffered.

Several times during Saturday afternoon, in response to loud questions put by the doctors, he roused enough to comprehend the questions and briefly answer them. With each attempt his articulation became more difficult.

After the consultations were over he never spoke again. His unconscious sleep became deeper and more profound through Sunday and Monday, until Tuesday morning, at twenty minutes to ten, his breath grew fainter—then stopped. The end he had hoped for was his. As warriors of old prayed that they might die in full armor, not a piece wanting or rusted from disuse, in the full activity of the fight, so he prayed that he might be spared the slow wasting of disease or the impairment of his physical and mental powers.

No black, no mourning drapery of any kind, was permitted about the house or on his coffin. At the door hung a beautiful wreath of delicate pink and white roses, gathered at the top by a large white satin bow, renewed afresh each morning by the hands of a beloved friend.

Against every form of mourning he had always revolted; to him death was but the gate to heaven, and the black symbols of ancient paganism he could not endure:

“The scholastic theology, filled with gloomy ideas sifted through stern Romish minds from teachings of pagan Romans has come down to us, until the representations of death that exist in the literature of Rome are more abominable and cruel than all the vices of all the Neros, or any other of the corrupt emperors. The scholastic conceptions of dying and of death are unworthy of reason, unworthy of conscience, and are blasphemous to God and to His government. They have no foundation in the New Testament, none certainly in the Old, and they ought to be purged out of our imaginations. Yet it lingers with us, and when death has come the household has not one note of triumph, not one star shines through the grief, nor one door of flashing light is opened. We cover the pictures, we shut up the instruments of music, we close the windows and shut out the light; we have a black hearse with plumes plucked from the wings of midnight, and we send for our minister, who doles out lugubrious, mournful themes, and we sing awful hymns. And then because 677one’s child has gained the coronation of glory, and is in the arms of Jesus, and rests from all labor and trial and temptation, we put on black—black over the head, black around the neck, black down to the feet, black inside! We carry the habiliments of woe and darkness and gloom, and think that we can see death everywhere. No other thing is as this. The one thing that men carry everywhere with them, and they are bound to share alike with brothers, strangers, friends, is that one thing that is borrowed from the despotism and cruelty of heathenism. Not one joy, not one thanksgiving, not one gleam of faith and hope, not one promise of Jesus Christ, not one single second of immortality and glory, is permitted to cheer the soul. All is night, black night, hopeless night. Sinful, the whole of it, unchristian, ungrateful!...

“One of the most beautiful things I ever saw in my whole European tour was the burial place of a Prussian queen who died during the great struggle against Napoleon, when the nation was ground almost to extinction, leaving her kingly husband almost inconsolable. At some distance from the capital, and in the midst of the solemn wood, he built a temple to her memory. It was of marble. As I entered, the light shone down through blue glass, casting a sad, sorrowful tone on all that its rays shone upon. But further on, upon entering the inner chamber, the cheerful light of God’s sun streamed in through the numerous windows and illuminated the ceiling, which was covered with glowing Scripture passages of death and immortality. And there in that blessed sunlight lay the sculptured form of the queen, forming the most perfect embodiment of rest, and peace, and triumph that my eyes ever beheld. There was nothing, sad or sorrowful, or painful to be seen; only the light of the glory of God as set forth in the sun; and the whole room glowed with cheer and brightness, and the monument was not gloomy but peaceful. I bless God with all my heart for that sight; it has been a comfort to me in many a dark day and long struggle of suffering, for already have I seen the triumph of death, the sweetness and the peace of victory, in that monumental marble.”

On Thursday a private funeral service was held at the house, the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Hall, of the Church of the Holy Trinity, officiating, in accordance with the expressed wish of Mr. 678Beecher. Between the two a deep and lasting friendship had existed. In the dark days, when not a few of the clerical brethren of his own denomination in Brooklyn doubted, or, hesitating, held back awaiting the result, Dr. Hall, in a manner characteristic of his brave and manly nature, went out of his way to show, in public, his confidence and love for Mr. Beecher. The latter attending service one day, during the time when the clouds hung heaviest, at the Church of the Holy Trinity, the doctor, seeing him in the congregation, descended into the aisle, and, taking his friend by the hand, led him to a seat within the chancel. Mr. Beecher, always forgetful of injuries, never forgot an act of friendship. It was his oft-repeated wish that, should he be called first, the voice of this brave, beloved friend might speak the words of cheer and comfort to those he left behind.

At the close of the service, Company G, of the Thirteenth Regiment—which, having been largely recruited from the young men of Plymouth Church, was called the “Plymouth Company,” and affectionately styled by Mr. Beecher “My boys”—with arms reversed, banners furled, and muffled drums, marched to the house, and, as a guard of honor, escorted the body of their pastor, chaplain, and friend to the church, as he was borne for the last time within its doors, and laid him, silent for the first time, at the foot of that pulpit from which his voice, during well-nigh forty years, had so often rung out to right the wrong, to lift up the down-trodden, to uphold the weak, to elevate mankind; that had so often preached comfort to the sorrowing, light to those in great darkness, pointing out the way of life to struggling sinners, and revealing that boundless love of God which was the keynote of his theology.

Till Saturday morning an almost continuous stream passed through the church to look in a last farewell upon the face of a friend, scarcely ending with midnight, renewed again by daylight, all day long. Old men and children, rich and poor, met to mourn a common loss.

He rested in a bed of flowers, the coffin hidden from sight by twining smilax, covered with white pinks and rosebuds; pulpit and organ buried in flowering shrubs and graceful plants, decorated with many floral designs.

Lying in State in Plymouth Church.

On Friday morning the public funeral service was held, Dr. Hall preaching the sermon.

680Simultaneous with the services at Plymouth, funeral services were held in the three nearest adjoining churches.

On the proclamation of the mayor, business was suspended during the day; the Legislature adjourned, sending a special committee to attend as its representatives at the funeral.

On Sunday a memorial service was held in Plymouth Church, in which the representatives of every creed took part—Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant—and nearly every denomination of Protestantism vying each with another in paying tributes of respect, gratitude, and love to their common brother—a most fit, practical example of that for which he had always preached, the universal brotherhood in God.

On Saturday, the 12th, the body was taken quietly to Greenwood.

“To-day Henry Ward Beecher’s body was buried in Greenwood. His hearse was followed in sympathy and honor by millions of his countrymen. The mourners were of all kindred and of every language. Not in this generation, at least, has there been a funeral so nobly significant. In the stately procession walked the viewless forms of principles, of governments, of nations, and of races. The guardian spirit of the slave whom he helped to liberate; the fair, sad genius of the Green Isle, for which he so often and so eloquently pleaded; the dusky representative of the Chinese Empire, in behalf of whose sons he again and again demanded justice; the fair form of modern science with the radiance of the morning sun on her queenly brow; the benign angel of charity, clothed in the whiteness of that purity which renders sin invisible; democracy, with her free step, flowing hair, and cap of many hues; Columbia, full of matronly grace and benignant as the atmosphere of June; and Christianity, calm, motherly, and forgiving—these are the pall-bearers by whom the body of our hero was borne to its resting-place....”^[20]

On a sunny slope in that most beautiful of all cemeteries, overlooking the Bay of New York, is the grave of Henry Ward Beecher. But it is only the grave: “When I fall, and am buried in Greenwood, let no man dare to stand over the turf and say, ‘Here lies Henry Ward Beecher,’ for God knows that I will not lie there. Look up; if you love me, and if you feel that I have 681helped you on your way home, stand with your feet on my turf and look up; for I will not hear anybody that does not speak with his mouth toward heaven.”

With all our sorrow we cannot begrudge him the rest and peace so well earned, nor that for which he had so often prayed—a quiet, painless departure while yet each faculty was unimpaired. He remembered with deepest pain the failing years of his own father, who lingered till all his faculties became impaired:

“My venerable father, who was a second David in his time—a man of war—and yet who had as sweet a heart as ever an angel woman had, lived through many last years of weakness and obscuration, and I had to remember a great way back to find my father. It was very pitiful, very painful.

“That is one reason why I do not want to be an old man. I hope God will have so much consideration for my weakness—if it be a weakness—as to let me drop down in my harness and in the full energy of work. I have no fear whatever of dying: it is only the fear of living that I have before my eyes....

“Some persons talk about a man having passed through a stormy life, and sitting now at the end of his life in quiet, preparing himself for heaven. Heaven does not want any such preparation as that. That is the best preparation which a man makes when he is using the whole force of his being in his day and time. I would rather die with the harness on and be dragged out by the heels. I would like to fall in the traces. You cannot help scoring one year against yourself and growing old in one way; but it is the outward man that is growing old. The wine that is in you ought to be growing better and better every year. Time should mellow and ripen it. True, if a man’s power is dried up, he cannot do more than he has strength for; but every man should do up to the measure of his strength, and not forget the sudden appearing of God in his own day and in his own time.

“I love those streams that run full, clear to the ocean. Some men there are who are like mountain streams, torrent-fed, that boom in the spring, with wondrous glory of fulness and power, and go rushing through the earlier months, but slacken their speed, and by midsummer are only a trickling reminiscence of the river. I like to think of streams like the old Merrimac, that begin work up near their head-waters, and never run a league 682without turning some mighty wheel of industry, and have no vacation to the end, but go into the sea with the very foam on their surface.”

For him death had no terrors; it was the gate opening into eternal rest and peace—that peace for which he had so often yearned and longed in his later years. Death was the welcome friend, not the dreaded foe.

“Is there anything sweeter to grief and sorrow than that passage where the New Testament, sweet book of the soul, speaks of dying? Let Tuscanized Romans talk of death; let heathen mythologies come to us with skulls, and cross-bones, and hideous images of dying, of the monster Death, of the tyrant Death, of the scythe-armed Death, of a grim and terrible fate; but what terror can any of these representations have for us when we have for our encouragement and hope the promises of the New Testament?

“On a summer’s day the gentle western wind brings in all the sweets of the field and the garden; and the child, overtasked by joy, comes back weary, and climbs for sport into the mother’s lap; and before he can sport he feels the balm of rest stealing over him, and lays his curly head back upon her arm; and look! he goes to sleep; hush! he has gone to sleep, and all the children stand smiling. How beautiful it is to see a child drop asleep on its mother’s arm! And it is said, ‘He fell asleep in Jesus.’ Is there anything so high, so noble, or divine, as the way in which the New Testament speaks of dying? How near death is, and how beautiful!

“If you have lost companions, children, friends, you have not lost them. They followed the Pilot. They went through airy channels, unknown and unsearchable, and they are with the Lord; and you are going to be with Him, too. I die to go, not to Jerusalem, but to the New Jerusalem. I die, not to wait in the rock-ribbed sepulchre, which shall hold me sure; I die, that when this body is dropped I shall have a place, in the inward fulness of my spiritual power, with the Lord.

“Then welcome gray hairs! they come as white banners that wave from the other and higher life. Welcome infirmities! they are but the loosening of the cords preparatory to taking down the tabernacle. Welcome troubles! they are but the signs that we are crossing the sea, and that not far away is our home—that 683house of our Father in which are many mansions, where dwells Jesus, the loved and all-loving. And let us rejoice that He has gone from the body, that He may be ever present in the spirit, and that ere long we may be with Him.”

His life had been full and complete. Unconsciously, in words of matchless beauty, he painted his own picture when he said:

“And the most beautiful thing that lives on this earth is not the child in the cradle, sweet as it is. It is not ample enough. It has not had history enough. It is all prophecy. Let me see one who has wrought through life; let me see a great nature that has gone through sorrows, through fire, through the flood, through the thunder of battle, ripening, sweetening, enlarging, and growing finer and finer, and gentler and gentler, that fineness and gentleness being the result of great strength and great knowledge accumulated through a long life—let me see such a one stand at the end of life, as the sun stands on a summer afternoon just before it goes down. Is there anything on earth so beautiful as a rich, ripe, large, glowing, and glorious Christian heart? No, nothing.”

685APPENDIX.

Mr. Beecher’s trial lecture was the first sermon which he preached as a clergyman. It may be interesting, both from that fact and because, as Mr. Beecher himself once remarked, it shows how commonplace a sermon a man might write who subsequently attained to some eminence as a preacher.

For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth; it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.—Isaiah lv. 10, 11.

No one can read the Bible, even superficially, without observing how much it brings in the natural world to illustrate the truths of the moral. Of the truths of God’s government or of his own Being it may be said “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” The passage assigned as the subject of this lecture is remarkable in this respect, since two departments are compared—the truth of God is compared with the elements.

It will be particularly noticed here that no formal analogy is set up between the effect of truth and the effect of natural causes. Nor are the two compared in all respects.

It is not intimated that truth acts as natural causes act—that truth produces effects on mind in the same way as rain does upon the earth and its vegetation. Nothing of this. The comparison instituted respects one thing, and only one thing, and that is the equal certainty of two things. The passage teaches simply and only that there is as much certainty that the truth of God will produce its appropriate results, in its own way, as there is that natural elements will, in their own way, produce their natural results. Those who attempt to draw a parallel between the operations of God’s moral government and His natural one, and call upon this passage for witness, neither understand the import of this text nor the nature of the thing whereof they treat.

It is a comforting declaration, and to none more so than to Christians who love truth. We often fear that it will be covered up, its influence destroyed; that through the weakness of men, or the power of evil, or some disastrous reverse of events, its power will be lost. And particularly are 688ministers, whose chief duty it is to study truth, to promulgate and confirm it throughout the community, liable to despond when they find themselves coping with so many malign influences, so much coldness, and scepticism, and worldliness, and ignorance. If they look only upon the narrow scale upon which they labor, it often would seem as if there were indeed no power in truth, no certainty that it would fructify.

It is an assurance, then, to our faith, and a great comfort to us in our toil, when we listen to Him who sitteth in the heavens, and before whom all things are open and naked—who sits serene above all the whirl which distracts and confuses us on this dusty earth, and hear Him say, seeing the beginning from the end of all things: “For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth; it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”

We design at this time to draw from our text a few obvious inferences, to confirm and illustrate and apply them.

1. We may infer that truth is adapted to produce moral results in this world.

How it produces them we shall not examine. It is a matter of philosophy, of speculation, and we concern ourselves with the practical bearing of our text.

This inference will appear the more plainly true if we consider—

1. That the Bible is explicit upon this head. Paul says to Timothy: “From a child thou hast known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation, through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”

And not satisfied with specific assertion, he generalizes and makes it a general principle: “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Timothy iii. 16–17).

Could anything be more untrue, if truth has not an adaptation to produce what it is said to do?

Throughout the Bible God regards truth as sufficient to accomplish His purposes, and nothing is so severely dealt with, by rebuke and judgment, as that deficiency and sin which comes of neglecting or refusing truth.

“What more could I have done for my vineyard than I have done? Wherefore, when I looked, that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?”

A constant visible Providence, mighty acts, the record of wonderful deliverances and mercies, and the institutes of a beneficent law—were not these adapted to produce the required obedience in the Jews? If truth have not adaptation to produce moral results, the Jew very pertinently might have replied to this severe rebuke: What has been done to produce obedience? Nothing but a series of truths have been given which have no adaptation or tendency to produce holiness.

689Nothing has been done to make us other than we are. And in exact accordance with the spirit of this was Christ’s teaching when He said: “If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but now they have no cloak for their sin” (John xv. 22).

2. The very object for which truth was revealed confirms the truth of our inference. It was revealed either for something or for nothing. If for nothing, it was foolishness. But if for something, then either it was fitted to produce what it was created for, or it was not. If it was not adapted to produce that for which it was created, then God attempted to bring to pass an end with means ill-adapted to that end. He raised up an instrumentality without adaptation to do what he desired. But what is meant by instrumentality, which has nothing of an instrument in it? What is instrumentality without any adaptation to do anything? Consequently if we would avoid imputing such weakness, such double folly and failure to God, we must admit with the Bible the adaptation of truth to produce its appropriate moral results.

Men travel across the express declarations of His word, and cross reason, to support a philosophical theory which, after all, destroys the very thing for which they framed it.

3. Our inference becomes still more apparent in truth if for a moment we admit the opposite doctrine and watch its results.

(1) The law is composed of truths respecting God, His relations to us, and ours to Him—the duties flowing thence, the penalties and rewards respectively of disobedience or obedience, our duties to one another, etc.; and all this professedly is given to restrain from evil and produce good.

But if truth has no adaptation to produce moral effects, the law was designed to do what it had no adaptation to do. It could have no influence and no power, and God is represented as framing a law to do what it had no relevancy to do.

(2) The character of God—why is it held forth to excite admiration and love, if that has no adaptation to excite such feelings?

There is nothing in God, nothing in His attributes, which can awaken the least emotion, unless truth can work out moral results.

(3) And precisely so of all the recorded doings of God since creation, especially that stupendous spectacle—the Atonement. All is thrown away as respects influence upon intelligent moral beings, they are utterly worthless, if they have no power to do anything. In short, this theory, so unfounded, so monstrous either in philosophy or fact, so repugnant to every declaration of God, would destroy every influence which the Bible was sent to produce.

It cuts off the mind from any influence except that by which a stick or stone might be moved from place to place. The strong declaration of the Bible that men resist the truth—how, if nothing to resist?

We admit that truth, as a matter of fact, does not produce its legitimate results without the influence of the Holy Spirit. But then the reason lies in the depravity of our hearts, and not in any want of adaptation in the truth.

690God made it ample, it was enough to create infinite obligation, and, if unresisted, to have kept us from sin and trained us up in holiness. Our depravity resisted its action, and would always; and this is the ground and necessity of the interference of the Holy Spirit.

Not the want of light, but men love darkness better; not the want of adaptation in truth, but men resist it, and will do so for ever, unless God shall send the Holy Spirit. In His hands truth becomes omnipotent. He pierces with it the darkest eye, and sounds it upon the deafest ear, and rouses up the deadest heart, “enlightening by it their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God, and effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ, being made willing by His grace.”

We are not, however, to rest satisfied with this mere intellectual view of this point. It has very deep, practical importance, which I shall briefly lay open to you.

1. It shows you the importance of knowing what the truth is exactly.

God has made truth to produce certain results of good, and no substitute for it will. The husbandman who would raise a harvest of wheat must sow wheat, not something which is only very much like it. The Christian who would have the fruits of truth in his heart must believe the truth, and not something that is very much like it.

He who would have the fruits of God’s love in his heart, who would grow rich in the graces of the Spirit of God, must understand God’s character just as it is revealed—i.e., just as it is, for it is the truth of His character which will produce salutary results, and nothing else will. Hence those who entertain false views of God have a deficient condition of mind and heart in exact proportion as they deviate from the truth; and this is the reason why those who reject the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour wane in piety, in happiness, and finally experience from their view of God hardly one beneficial result. They have expected that what was not true would produce in them the effect of what was true. Consequently we find the sacred writers anxiously inculcating a diligent, careful study of the character of God, as Paul to the Colossians (chap. ii. 2, 3): “That their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgment of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ; in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

And just before: “That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God.”

So, too, Eph. i. 17: “That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.”

2. So also respecting doctrine. We are bound to know exactly what God has revealed, for that is to produce the good effect in the hands of the Spirit, and not an imagination which we think is true. If by total depravity we teach something else than that which the Bible teaches, will the same results flow? If, instead of regeneration, as Christ and Paul explain it, we 691vamp up a theory aside and different from it, will the effect be the same? Will the Holy Spirit employ it equally with the other?

Nay, he who does not preach truth, and believe truth, preaches error and believes error. Truth saves, and error destroys. And this is the reason why it is some matter what a man believes, provided he is sincere. God does not regenerate and save by sincerity, but by truth. Error received sincerely is only error placed where it shall work out its fullest evils with the greatest certainty, and with every help which the heart can afford. Error sincerely received is death cordially embraced.

3. Hence we see how deeply important it becomes for Christians to employ prayer and diligent study of the Bible, that the Holy Spirit of God may enlighten their minds with all truth.

All that which constitutes a pure and holy heart must come from truth; ourselves and our hearers are to be saved by truth in the hands of the Holy Spirit. How earnestly, then, should we seek His divine, unerring guidance! If He teach us, we shall have truth indeed; but if left to our depraved hearts how soon shall we draw in error, how soon shall we be spoiled by vain philosophy and deceit after the traditions of men, after the rudiments of this world, and not after Christ! And if deserted forever, how rapid will be our deterioration from bad to worse, until eternal death do close upon us!

4. The importance of propagating, through all the world, the Bible, is most particularly taught in the text, and is most appropriately deduced from our position. God has promised that His Holy Spirit shall go with it, shall make it effective. Would we fill the earth with the power of God’s Spirit, send abroad the Bible, by which He has graciously determined to act, and through which He will sanctify and save.

II. The second inference which I draw from this passage is that, when the truth is properly explained and applied, we are both allowed and bound to expect corresponding auspicious results.

1. So Christ and His apostles taught by example. Christ refused to throw away labor when nothing could be expected from it. Hence He never would open to the Pharisees and bigoted doctors of Jerusalem the nature of His message, nor descant upon the character of God, nor urge upon them His claims, nor urge them to repent, nor work miracles before them. He knew the heart of man, and knew that no good would follow. If, then, the ground of exclusion from the labors of His ministry was that there could be no hope of success, then where He did labor it must have been upon the ground of hope of success.

So Paul repeatedly rejoices in the power of the Gospel to save mankind, and gloried in this with great exultation, proclaiming that on this account he was not ashamed of it.

Now, was it the mere fact that Paul felt that the truths of the Gospel had the power, abstractly, to save mankind, without any particular expectation that they would do so, or did his heart fire because he most confidently expected that nations would be born to Christ by his preachings? No one whose heart ever burned with a desire of glorifying God by gathering 692in souls to His kingdom can hesitate to say which of these inspired Paul. It is no joy, no subject of particular gratulation, that the Gospel can save mankind, unless we also believe that it actually will.

The only reason why we rejoice in its adaptation to save the world is because we believe that the world should be saved.

How wide of the truth are they who think that a faithful, sincere Christian or minister has no right to expect the fruits of their labor, but are bound to rest as satisfied that it should not as that it should happen! It is a spirit utterly repugnant to the Gospel. Some would imagine that we should not so expect—expect confidently the fruit of our labors—because God is a Sovereign and worketh according to the counsel of His own will.

But this is the very ground upon which we build our confidence.

It is because God, as a Sovereign, acting most freely and according to the purposes of His own will, hath joined to truth its appropriate results, and has encouraged us to expect them. If God were no Sovereign, we should have no confidence, never knowing what might or might not happen. But now, since He is Supreme, and hath joined truth, well applied, to a certainty of corresponding results, we shall most shamefully do violence to His Divine Sovereignty if we affect to doubt whether it will in fact be as He hath ordained that it shall be. If He had not joined means to ends it would be temerity to expect the one from the other.

But since He has, it would be doubting Him, contradicting Him, if we were not so to do.

To the diligent farmer God gives abundant increase, to the laborious artist remuneration corresponding to his skill. To the faithful minister, who rises betimes to sow the seeds of life and waters them with his tears, God will give him an abundant harvest; and the diligent Christian who employs all the means of truth within his reach, in humble reliance upon God, shall not be disappointed. He may expect growth in grace, and God will not falsify his hopes.

The Sovereignty of God is the sure ground upon which every one may build his hopes and not be disappointed. For God is not a man that He should lie, hath He said, and shall He not do it?

2. Success of ministry and Christian effort demand it for very constitution of our nature.

3. Only ground on which the multiplied institution of the Gospel can be available.^[21]

III. The third inference which I draw from this passage is that the instrumentality of the truth, the efficiency of the means, does not detract from the power of God, but highly illustrates it.

1. It will be observed in this passage that, although so much efficiency is given to truth, yet God is continually speaking, and speaking, too, in the air of most sovereign authority. Truth is made to appear perfectly subservient to his Divine Will. “So shall My word be that goeth forth 693out of My mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”

2. The reason why it illustrates and does not detract from God’s supremacy and power may now easily be seen. It shall do just what God wishes to be done, and for which He appointed it, and for which He made it efficient. Besides this it can do nothing else. It can only do this because God so wills. Truth is not an agent acting, since God made it, independently of God, self-moved; nor is it to be turned by man to do as he wishes. It does what it was made to do, and God made it, so that all its effects are but new examples of the power of God. It hangs where God placed it, and shines in the sphere He circumscribed, and nowhere else.

3. It accomplishes this result, which belongs to it, not from any inherent virtue which redeems it from the power of God, and causes its effects to illustrate only its own power, but simply and always because God pleases that it should do so. As its powers are enlarged and encompass greater results, so must be the conception of His power who clothed it with such efficiency.

And God always sustains truth, and those circumstances by which it can produce fitting results, and if He dropped them for one moment from His care they would perish.

Whoever, then, finds that the employment of means of truth is producing a forgetfulness of God, may be assured that he is using them wrongfully. It is a pernicious result wrought in him by abusing our constituted mode of action.

He who properly appreciates the notion of means and instrumentality will ever have most occasion to admire both the power and goodness of God, and His wisdom too, in that constitution of things which He has made. 694[Blank Page]

• Abolitionists, feeling against, H. W. Beecher on, 268, 420;
  • ostracized socially, 185;
  • Webster, Daniel, on, 239.
• Advance, the, organization of, 491.
• Advisory Council (1874), assembling of, 526;
  • call for, 523;
  • deliverance of, 527;
  • Plymouth invited at, declines, 527;
  • protest against, a, 524.
• Advisory Council (1876), assembling of, 543;
  • Beecher, H. W., cautions on, to church, 539,
    • statements at, 544–549,
    • declared innocent by, 550,
    • address to, at close, 552;
  • call for, 537;
  • committee on charges, advises an, 550, 558;
  • composition of, 538;
  • officers of, 543, 544;
  • Plymouth sustained by, 549;
  • principle of selection of, 538;
  • questions submitted to, 538;
  • Sturtevant’s, Dr., opinion of Mr. Beecher, 551;
  • Wellman’s, Dr., opinion of Mr. Beecher, 550.
• Allen, Ethan, remark of, on British cruelty, 35.
• America, a “better England,” 25.
• Amherst, Mass., in 1827, 93;
  • Beecher’s, H. W., garden plot in, 96.
• Amherst College in 1830, 112;
  • Beecher’s, H. W., course at, 109-135;
  • offers title of D.D. to Mr. Beecher, 391.
• Anderson, Gen. Robert, tribute to, by Mr. Beecher, 452.
• Anecdotes:
  • Boston woman, the cross, 118;
  • calf and bees, 637;
  • cannon-ball, the, 87;
  • cat in the organ, 382;
  • cow, chase of the, 141;
  • “Dinah, Crazy,” 243;
  • dog Noble, 290;
  • English beggar, 670;
  • “follow-your-leader,” 85;
  • Fulton omnibuses, 248;
  • grammar, lesson in, 75, 76;
  • Grant, Gen., and Mr. Beecher’s titles, 663;
  • kite, the, 203;
  • liquor-seller, the, 195;
  • lions, two monstrous, 51;
  • ruffian, the, 194;
  • slaves, teaching of, 253;
  • sleeper in church, 186;
  • Stowe, Prof., outwitted, 141;
  • tides, explanation of, 76;
  • truant, the, 184;
  • tub-raft, the, 208;
  • “Tutor’s Delight,” 116.
• Arthur, Chester A., opinion on, of Mr. Beecher, 575;
  • on renomination of, 576.
• Articles, H. W. Beecher’s, sources and characteristics of, 325, 326;
  • Cause and Cure of Agitation (1850), 242;
  • Christian’s Duty to Liberty (1854), 276;
  • Church and Steamboat (1850), 350, 351;
  • Contrast, The (1862), 335;
  • Controversy, Harsh (1850), 244;
  • Convictions, Various, and Sin (1852), 353;
  • Country’s Need (1862), 328;
  • Courage and Enterprise (1862), 324;
  • Crisis, The (1854), 273;
  • Defence of Kansas, 283;
  • Degraded into Liberty (1852), 263;
  • Different Ways of Giving (1850), 352;
  • Disbanding of Bowdoin St. Church (1862), 98;
  • Dog Noble and Empty Hole (1856), 290;
  • Dull Meetings, One Cause of (1852), 353;
  • Duty, The Great (1862), 327;
  • Duty of the Hour (1862), 323;
  • Duty of To-day (1862), 330;
  • Flowers in Church (1802), 392;
  • Fugitive Slave Bill (1850), 240;
  • Ground, The Only (1862), 333;
  • Hearts and No Hearts (1856), 287;
  • Hours of Exaltation (1857), 373;
  • Hymns, Church (1855), 366;
  • Ice in the Church (1852), 353;
  • Infidel Toast, The (1859), 389;
  • Law and Conscience (1850), 240, 241;
  • Leader for the People (1862) 332;
  • Lind, Jenny (1850), 351;
  • Litchfield Revisited (1856), 35;
  • Liturgy, Church, 370;
  • Men, not Slaves (1862), 323;
  • Mountain and the Closet (1857), 373;
  • Naval Discipline (1852), 355;
  • Newspaper Report, on a (1852), 356;
  • Our Help from Above (1862), 323;
  • Patriotism of the People (1862), 329;
  • Proclamation of Emancipation, on (1862), 336;
  • Queer Pulpit, A (1862), 334;
  • 696Reconstruction (1862), 333;
  • Remember the Poor (1850), 352;
  • Root of the Matter (1862), 331;
  • Salutatory (1861), 321;
  • Shall we Compromise? (1850), 237;
  • Silence must be Nationalized (1856), 287;
  • Time, The, has Come (1862), 332;
  • Trumpet, The (1862), 335;
  • Use of the Beautiful by Christians, 393;
  • War with England (1861), 322;
  • Word from the People to Congress (1862), 323;
  • Working with Errorists (1859), 380.
• Atchison, David R., in Kansas war, 277.

• Bacon, Rev. Leonard, letters of, against Tilton, 527;
  • letter of, on reconciliation, 559.
• Barnes, Hiram (Litchfield), reminiscence of, 37.
• Beach, Hon. W. A., convinced of H. W. Beecher’s innocence, 533.
• Beecher, Rev. Charles, anecdotes by, of H. W. Beecher, 50;
  • music, early work in, 92, 138, 139;
  • recollections by, of boyhood, 57, 58,
    • of Seminary days, 139.
• Beecher, David, character of, 17;
  • strength of, 20.
• Beecher, Rev. Edward, promotes Advance, 491.
• Beecher, Esther, influence of, on H. W. Beecher, 68, 69;
  • in Brooklyn, 352;
  • Mr. Beecher’s tribute to, 38.
• Beecher, George (son of Lyman), death of, 204.
• Beecher, Hannah, reminiscence of, 19.
• Beecher, Harriet (daughter of Lyman)—see Stowe, Harriet B.
• Beecher, Harriet (wife of Lyman), arrival of, at Litchfield, 54;
  • Beecher’s, H. W., opinion of, 65,
    • religious instruction by, 77,
    • tribute to, 143;
  • death of, 143;
  • home training, methods of, 65;
  • impressions of Beecher family, 54, 55;
  • marriage of, to Lyman Beecher, 53;
  • reminiscence of, by Mrs. Stowe, 54.
• Beecher, Henry (1570), notice of, 19.
• Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward,
  • Administration, strictures on, in 1862, 328–331, 335;
    • distrusted by, in 1863, 397, 443,
      • feeling changed, 444.
  • Advisory Council (1876), on, 538;
    • cautions his people as to, 538;
    • statements at, 544;
    • challenge at, 545;
    • demands production of letters, 549;
    • declared innocent by, 550;
    • address to, at close, 552.
  • Agriculture, articles on, 182;
    • studies in, 198;
    • work in, 199.
    • See under Farm, p. 698, and Peekskill, p. 701.
  • Aid sought from, some samples of, 656.
  • Ambition of, for enterprise, 89;
    • personal, devoid of, 593,
      • advice to a relative on, 593, 594.
  • American, a typical, 25.
  • Amherst College, enters, 109;
    • course at, choice of, 112;
    • studies at, 113;
    • reminiscences by Dr. Field, 113, 115,
      • by Dr. Haven, 113,
      • by L. Tappan, 114, 117,
      • by S. H. Emery, 114,
      • by Rev. S. Hanks, 114;
    • debate, a victory in, 114;
    • “Tutor’s Delight,” 116;
    • sports at, 117;
    • financial difficulties, 117;
    • plans to earn money, 118;
    • in anti-slavery debate, 119;
    • record at, 135.
  • Ancestry of, 20, 21;
    • its legacy of loyalty and truth, 24.
  • Anderson, Gen. Robert, tribute to, 452.
  • Art, effect of works of, 346–348;
    • high, versus decorative, on, 645;
    • his collection of prints, 646.
  • Arthur, Chester A., praise of, 575;
    • renomination of, reasons for desiring, 575, 576.
  • Aspirations, on youthful, 89.
  • Attainments of, at ten, 70, 71.
  • Atonement, on doctrine of, 607.
  • Auction-sale, slave, imitation of, 292.
  • Audiences of, on early, 594.
  • Autobiography of, preparations for, 673.
  • Bacon’s, Dr. L., letter to, on reconciliation, 559;
    • reply, 560.
  • Bashfulness of, youthful, 70.
  • Battle of, a youthful, 36.
  • Beautiful, on Christian enjoyment of the, 393;
    • in nature, his love for, 394.
  • Beecher, Esther, tribute to, 38;
    • influenced by, 68.
  • Beecher’s, Harriet, impressions of, 55;
    • instructed in religion by, 77;
    • his tribute to, 143.
  • Beecher, Lyman, estimate of, 17;
    • effect on, of conduct of, 68, 69;
    • indignant at persecution of, 151.
  • Beecher, Roxana, tribute to, 24;
    • recollections of, 47;
    • influenced by memory of, 67, 554;
    • opinion of, from her letters, 128.
  • Beecher, Rev. T. K., reminiscence by, 90, 138.
  • Belgian court, experiences at, 404.
  • Bible, early analysis of, 137, 192;
    • on method of reading, 642.
  • Birth of, 37, 41.
  • Birds, love for, 615, 616.
  • Blaine, J. G., opinion of, 576;
    • refuses to support, 577,
      • threatened for refusal, 579;
    • election of, on probable result of, 579.
  • Books, on buying, 648.
  • Boston, bells of, amazed at, 83;
    • ships and Navy-Yard in, enthusiasm over, 84;
    • on juvenile feuds of, 85;
    • chief in, of “follow your-leader,” 85;
    • cannon-ball, purloins a, 87;
    • life at, in boyhood, 90–92;
    • moral influence of, bad, 92;
    • joins Bowdoin St. Church, 98;
    • receives call to, 216;
    • defence at, on scandal rumors, 535.
  • Bowen, Henry C., hostility of, 490, 492;
    • action of, in Tilton’s charge against Mr. Beecher, 511,
      • charge published, 513, 514;
    • on renewed charges of, 542, 543.
  • Brattleboro, Vt., lecture at, 130–132.
  • Brice, Pomona, help for, 293.
  • Brooklyn, declines reception by Common Council of, 672.
  • Brown, John, sermon on, 301.
  • Brussels, visit to, in 1863, 403.
  • Buchanan, Pres., on administration of, 305;
    • on fast-day of, 307.
  • Budington, Rev. W., church of, seeks to heal dissension in, 524;
    • letter to, on its protest, 526.
  • Callers, daily, description of, 657.
  • Calvinism, early teaching in, 70, 77.
  • Camp, life in, on dangers of, 319.
  • Catechism, a failure at, 65.
  • Character, moulding of, 44, 81;
    • at seventeen, 108, 112;
    • during college course, 113–116;
    • in manhood, 258.
  • Charity, on, 352;
    • demands on his, 658.
  • Charleston, S. C., invited to deliver address at (1865), 449;
    • Stanton’s despatch concerning, 450;
    • address at, 451–454;
    • purpose of, in going to, 460.
  • Children, love for, 639;
    • a method of whipping, 640;
    • his own, on newspaper report as to, 356;
    • training of, 640;
    • justice tempered by love, 641;
    • advice to, on self-helpfulness, 641,
      • on religion, on Bible-reading, 642,
      • on study, 642, 643,
      • on health and on duty, 643,
      • on choosing profession, 643,
      • on literary style, 644.
  • Chimes, church, first experience with, 83.
  • “Choosing good parents,” on, 17.
  • Christianity, on power of, to crush slavery, 268.
  • Christian Union, in control of, 491.
  • Church, going to, when a boy, 59,
    • • promises made, 60,
      • experiences at, 61;
    • on growth of a, 227, 483;
    • on proper work of a, 540.
  • Church-bell, adventure with a, 60.
  • Church-membership, on, 362.
  • Cincinnati, O., family life at, 140;
    • drives off his father’s cow, 141;
    • constable at, a, 142;
    • “family meeting” at, 142;
    • Journal of, editor of, 141.
  • Cleveland, Pres., remarks on slanders against, 577;
    • support of, reasons for, 577–580;
    • on administration of, 587.
  • Cleveland letters: invited as chaplain to convention, 461;
    • reply to invitation, 465,
      • public clamor against, 462,
      • remarks on, 474, 475;
    • Tyng’s, Dr., letter on, 469,
      • reply, 470;
    • Storrs’s, Dr., letter on, 471;
    • Mr. Beecher’s second letter, 472,
      • effect of, 477,
      • Storrs, Dr., on, 477;
    • assailed by Independent for, 501.
  • Coffee, effect of, 652.
  • Colors, how affected by, 649–651.
  • Compromise measures, article on, 236–238;
    • Missouri Compromise, on repeal of, 273–277;
    • appeal to ministers as to, 275, 276;
    • on offer of, in 1860, 306;
    • in general, on, 421;
    • on proposal for, in 1864, 446.
  • Congress, on proposed nomination to, 360.
  • Congregational Association, resigns from, 567, 568;
    • statement to, 568;
    • remarks on criticisms of his action, 569.
  • Congregational Church, estimate of, 610.
  • Conspiracy against, beginning of, 494;
    • statement on, 495–520,
      • effect of publication of, 531;
    • investigating committee, calls for an, 499, 528,
      • action of, 529, 530;
    • publicity of, motives for avoiding, 504, 519, 531, 544;
    • Eagle, card in, as to Woodhull letters, 522;
    • demands production of any letters, 529;
    • letter to, of Pres. Porter, 532;
    • on malignity of conspirators, 546, 553;
    • on prompt demands for investigation, 547;
    • on publishing of, 548;
    • cost of, 549, 565;
    • Shearman’s, T., part in, 549;
    • reflections on, 557;
    • hostility of press in, 558;
    • nervous strain from, 558;
    • English sympathy during, 668.
  • Conscientiousness of, how developed, 65.
  • Controversy, harsh, advice against, 244.
  • Conversion of, 98;
    • recollections of, 590.
  • Correspondence of, how conducted, 658.
  • Courage of, physical, in killing mad dog, 664.
  • Country, intense love for, 416, 460.
  • Courtship of, 121–127,
    • on false reports as to effects of, 129;
    • Saxon, description of, 127.
  • Cowper, William, on style of, 644.
  • Creditors, on duty to, 354.
  • 697Cunard steamers, on bigotry upon, 350;
    • falsehood as to, charged with, 351.
  • D.D., declination of title of, 391.
  • Daniel, Samuel, poem of, 134.
  • Darkness, early spiritual, 78–81, 119–121, 604;
    • darkness dispersed, 155.
  • Davis, Jefferson, on proposed hanging of, 458.
  • Death, impending, feelings of, 507, 508, 516, 556;
    • of his brother George, 204;
    • of his son George, 205;
    • of his daughter “Caty,” 224;
    • of his twin sons, 357;
    • of three nephews 372;
    • no fear of, 681, 682;
    • remarks on, 682;
    • his death, 676,
      • wishes concerning, 681,
      • private service at, 677,
      • service in Plymouth, 678;
    • burial of, 680;
    • grave of, 680.
  • Debate, early power in, 113, 114.
  • Denominationalism, on, 611.
  • “Depravity, total,” hatred of phrase, 380.
  • Divine, the, early strivings for, 77, 78, 100.
  • Doctrine, early knowledge of, 163, 165, 604;
    • commended for, 612.
  • Douglass, Fred, invitation to, to Plymouth, 248.
  • Dramatic power of, early, 96.
  • Ecclesiastical machinery, dislike of, 152, 153, 606.
  • Edinburgh, Scotland, speech at, in 1863, 419–422.
  • Editor, on power of an, 321;
    • editorial articles, sources of, 325,
      • characteristic features of, 325, 326.
  • Edmonson sisters, in purchase of, 292.
  • Elections of 1884,
    • distrusts Mr. Blaine, 576;
    • endorses Mr. Cleveland, 577, 578,
      • remarks on, 578,
      • answer to remonstrance on, 579, 580,
      • answer to threat, 580;
    • active work in, 580;
    • review of, 584–586;
    • excitement in, on calm after, 586.
  • Ellsworth, Col., on death of, 313.
  • Elocution, how acquired, 95, 96;
    • gesture in, a favorite, 186.
  • Emancipation, demands, 331, 332, 333, 335;
    • Proclamation of, article on, 336;
    • God’s will, resigned now to, 337, 338.
  • England, on war with, 322, 412;
    • departure for, in 1850, 339;
    • impressions of Warwick Castle, Kenilworth, 340,
      • of Cæsar’s Tower, Guy’s Tower, 341,
      • of Stratford-on-Avon, 342, 344,
      • of Oxford, Bodleian Library, 344, 345;
    • Episcopal services in description of, 342–344;
    • return from, 349.
    • Departure for, in 1863, 396;
      • motives for, 396, 397;
    • on sympathy in, for South, 399, 400;
    • arrival in, declines to speak, 400;
    • Congregational clergy of, strictures on, 401;
    • London, first speech in, 401, 402,
      • second speech in, 432–436;
    • United States, on English dread of, 402, 403;
    • consents to speak in, 406;
    • requests for speeches in, 407;
    • Manchester, speech at, 408–414;
    • offensive utterances against, denies, 416;
    • Liverpool, speech in, 422–432,
      • placarded in, enmity of press of, 422;
    • speeches in, effect of, 436, 441;
    • Storrs, Dr., on the work in, 437;
    • impressions from the visit, 438–441;
    • New York papers on his work in, 441;
    • welcomes delegates from, to Boston Council, 613.
    • Departure for, in 1886, 665;
    • friends’ enthusiastic farewell, 666;
    • retrospect on landing, 666, 668;
    • likened in, to Gladstone, 669;
    • preaching in London, 669;
    • Westminster Abbey, visit to, 669;
    • his work in, 670, 671;
    • public meetings in, on customs at, 670;
    • address in City Temple, 671;
    • return from, 672.
  • English-speaking peoples, claimed by all, 26.
  • English classics, love for, 113, 114, 133;
    • criticisms on, 145, 146.
  • Episcopal Church, impressed by service of, 343;
    • on liturgy of, 370;
    • charged with disrespect towards, 371;
    • vision of sermon in a, 377;
    • tribute to, 610.
  • Evil, method of combating, 194, 195, 217, 218, 219, 355.
  • Evolution, sermons on, 567;
    • belief in, 608, 609.
  • Exhortation in social meetings, on, 353.
  • Extemporaneous speech, early aptitude for, 113, 173.
  • Farm, work on, beginning of, 57, 617;
    • knowledge of farm-work, 199;
    • on one use of a, 360;
    • at Peekskill, 383, 619–638;
    • work on, as a recreation, 617.
  • Fishing, first experience at, 31;
    • a confession as to, 614–616.
  • Flowers, love for, 96, 616, 626;
    • brings him a rebuke, 96;
    • on abundance of, 392;
    • pulpit, on use in, 393;
    • at Boscobel, 626, 627;
    • how influenced by, 627.
  • Freedom of speech, on, 243, 245;
    • on stifling of, in Kansas, 284.
  • Fremont, on marriage of, 290.
  • Fugitive Slave Law, articles on, 236–238, 240–244.
  • Future punishment, on doctrine of, 608.
  • Gaelic blood in, source of, 18.
  • Garrison, William L., estimate of, 267.
  • Glasgow, Scotland, speech in, in 1863, 414–419.
  • 698Gospel, must preach it as revealed to him, 154.
  • Gospels, an analysis of, 192;
    • broad study of, 596.
  • Government, divine, views on, 326;
    • church, views on, 609.
  • Graduates, advice to, 173.
  • Grammar, youthful definition in, 75.
  • Hall, Rev. Chas. H., deep friendship for, 677.
  • Hammers, on animation of, 389.
  • Harrington, Moody, helped by, 120.
  • Health of, how founded, 31;
    • impaired in 1849, 339,
      • in 1863, 396;
    • management of, 652;
    • on duty as to, 651.
  • Heaven, digging to find, 49.
  • “Homeward Bound,” liking for, 379.
  • Home-life of, 639.
  • Honors, worldly, compared with ministry, 592.
  • Hopkinton, Mass., teaching at, 129, 130.
  • Horseback-riding, early attempt at, 55.
  • Horticulture, love for, 96;
    • studies in, 198;
    • work in, 199;
    • as an alterative, 394, 395.
  • Humorousness, early, 115;
    • some examples of, 75, 76, 116, 118, 122, 124.
  • Hymns: see Music, p. 700.
  • Imposed upon, remarks on being, 659.
  • Independent, contributor to, 328, 488;
    • editor of, 321, 488;
    • Salutatory, 321;
    • editorials in, in 1862, 322–336;
    • assailed by, for Cleveland letters, 469, 491;
    • resigns editorship, 490;
    • severs connection with, 491.
  • Indiana Farmer, editor of, 182, 185, 197.
  • Indianapolis, called to, 179,
    • • accepts call, 180;
    • recollections of parishioners, 181–187;
    • his churches at, 181, 183, 207;
    • his residences at, 182, 202;
    • personal appearance at, 183;
    • a refractory brother, 184;
    • popularity at, 186, 203;
    • an imitative tailor, 187;
    • revivals at, sermon before Presbytery, 189;
    • work in other towns, 190, 193;
    • labors in, against crime, 194, 195;
    • sermons at, on slavery, 195–197;
    • painting his own house, 202;
    • his class of girls at, 203;
    • helps at kite-making, 204;
    • recollections of, 206–209;
    • tub, adventure with, 208;
    • departure from, 216;
    • success at, charged to plagiarism, 218;
    • garden work at, 617.
  • Infidelity, early victory over, 74.
  • Infidels at Cincinnati, on the toast of, 381.
  • Influences on, early, 65, 66;
    • of Charles Smith, 66;
    • of Esther Beecher, 68;
    • of his father, 68, 69;
    • in Boston, 83, 84.
  • Information, early desire for, 108.
  • Instruction, catechetical, soon forgotten, 69.
  • Investigation, habit of, how acquired, 32.
  • Johnson, Pres., letter to, on reconstruction, 460;
    • stricture on, 470, 471;
    • accepts policy of, 473.
  • Journal of Commerce, criticism on, 334.
  • Journals of, object in keeping, 144, 145;
    • some extracts from, 109–112, 139, 144–150, 169, 339, 340.
  • Judiciary, corrupt (1867–71), thunders against, 572, 573.
  • Kansas, on emigration to, 284;
    • sends arms to, 283, 286;
    • on the contest in, 283, 301;
    • strictures on Administration, 302.
  • Knowledge, art of retaining, 647.
  • Kossuth, Louis, on the visit of, 256;
    • gift of Hungarian bracelet, 352.
  • Labor, physical, views on, 199;
    • in the North and the South contrasted, 418.
  • Lane Seminary, influence of, 137;
    • life at, 154;
    • graduates from, 157.
  • Latin, result of studies in, 88.
  • Law, on obedience to, 241, 242.
  • Lawrenceburg, called to, 157;
    • removes to, plans, 158;
    • church duties at, 159, 172;
    • success and salary at, 173;
    • housekeeping at, 174, 175;
    • Thomas’s, Rev. J. H., reminiscences, 176;
    • influence at, 177;
    • on a gift of clothing, 178, 179;
    • farewell sermon at, 180.
  • Laws lacking public sentiment, on, 459.
  • Leader, as a popular, 325.
  • Lectures of, his first, 130–132;
    • at Cincinnati in 1861, 309;
    • during Rebellion, 319;
    • politics and religion in, 390;
    • purpose of, 564;
    • field of, 564;
    • proceeds of, how spent, 564;
    • omitted during Conspiracy, 564;
    • resumption of, reasons for, 564, 565;
    • demonstrations at, 565,
      • remarks on, 566;
    • in Boston, reception at, 565;
    • West, reception in, 566;
    • Louisville, reception at, 566;
    • first before Yale students, how prepared, 598;
    • expenses in lecture-tours, 653.
  • “Lectures to Young Men,” purpose of, 200;
    • publishing of, 201.
  • Left to himself in boyhood, 59.
  • Lenox, Mass., farm at, 359, 618;
    • work on, 360;
    • relinquished, 372.
  • Leopold, King, presented to, 403, 404;
    • advice to, as to Mexico, 405.
  • Letter of, an early, 50.
  • Levée, adventures at a, 111.
  • Library of, how founded, 131, 133;
    • contents of, in 1835, 150,
      • in later life, 646, 647;
    • 699a working library, 647;
    • remark on, 647.
  • License, obtains a, 157.
  • “Life of Christ,” first volume of, completed, 480, 674;
    • second volume of, work on, 673, 674;
    • prophetic remark concerning, 674.
  • Lincoln, Pres., estimate of, work for, 304, 305;
    • on call of, for troops, 327, 328;
    • on vacillation of, in 1862, 329, 332, 333;
    • on duty of, 331;
    • on Emancipation Proclamation of, 336;
    • on Southern commission of, in 1864, 446;
    • tribute to, 447, 456;
    • death of, 454,
      • remarks on, 446, 455.
  • Lind, Jenny, defence of, 351;
    • reminiscence of, 351, 352.
  • Liquor, on selling of, by Christians, 354;
    • use of, 652, 653;
    • on need of, except as medicine, 653.
  • Litchfield, Conn., early life in, 31–33;
    • visit to, in 1856, 35–38;
    • reminiscences by people of, 36, 37;
    • winter at, 62, 63;
    • North Pole situated in, 63;
    • visit to, in 1857, 373.
  • Liturgy, on church, 370, 371.
  • Liverpool, Eng., arrival in, in 1863, 400;
    • talk in, a, 401;
    • speech in, 422–432;
    • placarded in, 422, 426;
    • threatened with violence in, 423;
    • risk in speaking in, 423;
    • subject of speech, 423;
    • reception at the hall, 424, 425.
  • London, Eng., first speech in, in 1863, 401;
    • second speech in, 432–436;
    • voice in, threatened failure of, 432, 433;
    • success in, 436;
    • preaches in, in 1886, 669.
  • Love, to enemies, on, 311–313;
    • Christian, better than logic, 380;
    • for friends, 658,
      • “slopping over,” remarks on, 658, 659.
  • McClellan, on defeat of, 328;
    • criticism on, 331.
  • Manchester, Eng., reception in, in 1863, 408, 409;
    • subject of speech in, 409;
    • speech in, 410–414;
    • victory in, 410;
    • effect of speech, 414.
  • Manliness and power, source of, 21.
  • Marriage of, 170, 171;
    • of his daughter, 388.
  • Mathematics, backwardness in, 94;
    • opinion of, 114.
  • Matteawan, N. Y., residence at, 372, 618.
  • Medical schools, views on, 353, 354.
  • Memory of, where defective, 647.
  • Militia, on need of moral influence on, 661;
    • as a member of, 660–663.
  • Ministers, classification of, 149;
    • should be joyous, 150;
    • on duty of, as to slavery, 248–252,
      • as to war-tax, 324,
      • in public affairs, 360,
      • as to preaching against evil practices, 361;
    • spiritual office of, 370.
    • See Preacher, p. 701.
  • Mitchel, John, prophecy on, 266.
  • Monarchies, excitements in, contrasted with United States, 585.
  • Moral principles, sacrifices for, 312.
  • Moulton, Frank, confidence in, 496, 497;
    • letter to, June, 1873, 515;
    • on letter from, 518;
    • wife of, opposition to, 560.
  • Mount Pleasant Institute, enters, 93;
    • mathematics at, 94, 100;
    • elocution at, 95;
    • recollections of W. P. Fitzgerald and J. W. Lovell, 94, 95;
    • chaplain of, rebukes H. W. Beecher, 96;
    • life at, 97;
    • studies at, 97, 100, 101;
    • religious experiences at, 97–102;
    • Bible work at, 99, 100;
    • troubles at, 102;
    • on card-playing at, 102;
    • visit to, in 1849, 107;
    • his character while at Institute, 108.
  • Mourning, on outward symbols of, 676;
    • Prussian queen, on tomb of a, 677.
  • Music, early work in, 92, 124, 138, 139, 144;
    • church music, on old methods of, 363;
      • reform in, 365;
    • “Plymouth Collection,” compilation of, 363–366;
    • hymns, views on, 366, 368;
    • music-writers, acquaintance with, 368, 369;
    • at prayer-meeting, 378;
    • organ, on value of, 600.
  • Name of, its source, 41;
    • names bestowed upon, 613.
  • Nation above party, 577.
  • Nature, love for, 32, 33, 59, 74, 96,
    • • acquired by study, 394;
    • religious impressions connected with, 77;
    • study of, for preaching, 596, 614, 615.
  • Navy, American, on moral defect in, 355.
  • Negroes, feeling toward, how influenced, 66;
    • fugitive, on help to, 240, 241, 323,
      • on return of, 252;
    • on ostracism of, 247;
    • on treatment of, by omnibuses, 247, 248;
    • on freedom being given to eight, 263;
    • treatment of, at North, 303;
    • on slaves liberated by army, 323;
    • on benefits to, of restoration of South, 463, 467, 473.
  • Newell, Constantine, affection for, 104–106.
  • New England stock, a product of, 25, 26.
  • “Noble,” anecdote of, 290.
  • Northbridge, Mass., teaching at, 130.
  • Northern merchants, on boycott of, 247.
  • Norwich, N. Y., impressions of, 389.
  • “Norwood,” quoted, 88;
    • published, 479.
  • Observation, habit of, how gained, 32.
  • Optimism, definition of, 585.
  • 700Oratorical powers, imperceptible in youth, 70.
  • Ordinances, church, view of, 609.
  • Ordination, examination for, 161, 165, 166;
    • Old School, refuses to subscribe to, 161, 162, 166;
    • ordained, 163, 167.
  • Original sin, on doctrine of, 607.
  • Orthodoxy, definition of, 606;
    • on tests of, 606, 607.
  • Paris, visit to, in 1850, 346;
    • art-galleries of, how affected by, 346–348, 349;
    • Vicksburg, hears of fall of, while visiting, 405,
      • effect on Southerners in, 406.
  • Parker controversy, peacemaker in, 259;
    • results, 260;
    • letters on, 261, 262.
  • Parker, Theodore, condemned for associating with, 380;
    • tribute to, 381.
  • Party, political, on blind subservience to, 577;
    • on redemption of a, 581.
  • Pastorates, short, opposed to, 180.
  • Patriotism of, where nurtured, 35;
    • strength of, 416.
  • Paul, St., compared with, 588, 589.
  • Peace (1861), denounces terms of, 310, 311.
  • Peekskill, N. Y., farm at, 383;
    • description of, 619, 620;
    • cottage at, 620;
    • improvements made, old apple-tree, 621, 622;
    • products of, 623;
    • early crops at, rivalry over, 623, 624;
    • Turner, T. J., outwitted by Mr. Beecher, 624,
      • thrifty nature of, 626;
    • flowers at, 626;
    • his “work” at, 627, 628;
    • new house at, 628–630,
      • chimney of, as a look-out, 629,
      • decoration of, 630;
    • trees and shrubs at, 630, 632;
    • benefits derived from, 632;
    • insects at, gratitude to, 632, 634;
    • fowls at, 634, 635,
      • the patent hatcher, 635, 636;
    • cattle at, 636;
    • bees at, 636, 637;
    • dogs at, 637,
      • remarks on “Tommy,” 638.
  • Perseverance, thoughts on, 147.
  • Personal attack, averse to, 354.
  • Pessimism, definition of, 585.
  • Phillips, Wendell, in Brooklyn, work for, 246.
  • Phrenology, acceptance of, 130;
    • lecturing on, 138, 144.
  • “Pinky,” buying freedom of, 294–297.
  • Plurality of wives of ancestors, remark on, 20.
  • Plymouth Church, invited to come to, his answer, 210–213;
    • called to, 214;
    • accepts call, reasons, 214, 215;
    • failure at, predicted, 217;
    • first sermon at, 218;
    • slavery, labors at, against, 219–221;
    • installed, 221;
    • success at, 222, 225;
    • revivals at, work in, 222, 375, 391;
    • prayer at, sample of a, 228;
    • prayer-meeting, lecture, sociable at, 229-231;
    • policy towards, 232;
    • retrospect, a (1863), 337;
    • prayer-meetings at, daily, 376,
      • influence of, 377;
    • on income of, 379;
    • organ at, on a new, 382;
    • on flowers in, 393;
    • on Silver Wedding of, remarks at, 481–484;
    • generosity of, in Conspiracy, 565;
    • tribute to, 578;
    • result of work in, 601;
    • welcome at, in 1886, 672;
    • funeral services at, 678;
    • memorial service at, 680.
  • “Plymouth Collection,” history of, 363–366;
    • terms of publication of, 364;
    • on alleged omission of Watts’s hymns from, 368.
  • Political secret societies, on, 362.
  • Politics, in the army, indignant at, 444;
    • on honesty and morality in, 583.
  • Prayer, early love for, 97, 100;
    • sample of, 228;
    • on extemporaneous, 371;
    • at prayer-meeting, 378;
    • reply to request for copy of a, 656.
  • Prayer-meetings, method of conducting, 376, 377;
    • on laughter in, 377.
  • Preacher, his rank as a, 588;
    • qualities as a, 589;
    • parental faith his first incentive, 590;
    • early training-school, 590;
    • temperament as a, 591;
    • high estimate of a, 592;
    • early life as a, a happy period, 593;
    • call to a, two essentials to, 594;
    • discouraged, advice to a, 595;
    • should consecrate every gift, 595.
    • See Ministers, p. 700.
  • Preaching, beginnings of, 130;
    • first in the West, 149;
    • naturalism in, 164;
    • to preach Christ only, 167, 178, 193, 227;
    • first real, at Indianapolis, 187;
    • versatility in, 193;
    • courage in, incidents of, 194, 195;
    • means of relief from, 198;
    • spirituality in, one source of, 391;
    • estimate of, 588;
    • on future scope of, 592;
    • theory of, 595;
    • involuntary preparation for, 596;
    • influence of his, on theology, 602;
    • manner in, an example, 605;
    • preparation for, 597–600, 655.
  • Precious stones, love for, soothing effect of, 649–651;
    • relief derived from, at Liverpool, 650;
    • reason for love of, 650, 651.
  • Pride, early struggles with, 102.
  • Private Journal of, at Amherst, 109;
    • contents of, 109, 110.
  • Profanity, on a case of, 642.
  • Prussian queen, on tomb of a, 677.
  • Pulpit, on freedom of, 248–252;
    • duty of, as to war-tax, 324,
      • in public affairs, 360, 361;
    • as a popular educator, 362;
    • preparation for, 655.
  • 701“Puritan penitentiary,” not born in a, 57.
  • Rats, at Litchfield, description of, 63.
  • Rebellion, on enlistment of son for, 310;
    • interest of, in organizing militia, 314;
    • sacrifices for, 316;
    • Fourteenth Regiment, equipment of, 316,
      • sermon to, 317;
    • Sixty-seventh Regiment, equipment of, 317, 488;
    • Union soldier, on duty of, 317, 318;
    • Bull Run defeat, on, 350;
    • on Administration’s inactivity and mismanagement, 324, 325, 328, 329,
      • on duty of, 330, 331;
    • God’s leadership in, prayer for, 332;
    • Union success in, confident of, 333;
    • Confederacy and Administration contrasted, 335;
    • state of, in 1863, 397;
    • enormous army, should be crushed by an, 443;
    • troops in, should be no distinction between, 443;
    • end of, joy at, 451, 455;
    • brought on by Southern politicians, 454.
  • Reconstruction of South, on President’s duty in (1862), 333;
    • speech on, 458;
    • letter on, to Pres. Johnson, 460;
    • on benefits of, to colored race, 463;
    • on military government in, 465, 466.
  • Recreation, mental, how taken, 394, 395.
  • Religion, meaning of, 642.
  • Religious experience of, at Litchfield, 65–69, 76–81;
    • at Mt. Pleasant, 97–102;
    • at Amherst, 119–121;
    • at Lane, 154, 155;
    • spiritual exaltation (1857), 373;
    • influence of early, 604.
  • Republican party, work for, in 1856, 289,
    • • in 1860, 304, 305,
      • in 1864, 571;
    • esteem of, 471;
    • in sympathy with (1866), 473;
    • favors election of members of, to Congress (1866), 475;
    • corruption in, labors against, 574;
    • reasons for not working for, 581–583;
    • still a member of, 584.
  • Republics, on political excitement in, 583.
  • Reputation, on posthumous, 557.
  • Responsibility, on individual, 219.
  • Retort, quickness of, 252, 253.
  • Revivals, at Litchfield, 81;
    • at Mt. Pleasant, 98;
    • at Amherst, 119;
    • at Terre Haute, 191, 192;
    • at Plymouth, 222, 231, 391;
    • method of conducting, 375–378.
  • Romance of, an early, 103.
  • Ruskin, John, tribute to, 394.
  • Sadness, a tendency to, 345, 346, 500, 556.
  • Sailor, on needs of the, 355.
  • St. Louis Library Association, asked to lecture before, 389;
    • matters to be avoided, his reply, 390.
  • Salisbury, Conn., on beauties of, 356.
  • Salvation, on, 379.
  • Sarah —, buying freedom of, 298–300.
  • Saviour, vision of sufferings of, 377.
  • Scepticism, a touch of, 154, 164.
  • Scholar, desires to be a, 593.
  • School life, beginning of, 49, 50;
    • experiences at district school, 51–53,
      • at Mr. Brace’s and Mr. Langdon’s, 72, 74,
      • at Catharine Beecher’s, amusing incidents, 75, 76;
    • progress in his studies, 83;
    • at Mt. Pleasant, 93–108.
  • Schools, the two Presbyterian, views on, 163.
  • Scott, Walter, early critique on, 145.
  • Sea-life, determines on, 89;
    • to study for it, 90, 93;
    • design abandoned, 99.
  • Seasons, allegorical view of, 616.
  • Sectarianism, on, 611, 612.
  • Sermons, illustrations for, how acquired, 32;
    • his earliest, 130;
    • first Western, 149;
    • first at Lawrenceburg, 173;
    • record book of, 179, 192;
    • at Indianapolis, 186, 187;
    • modelled on Apostles’, 188;
    • proper aim of, 188;
    • sermon on “Prodigal Son,” 189;
    • first sermon in Plymouth, 218,
      • outline of, 229;
    • issued in book form, 479;
    • Thanksgiving, custom in, 584;
    • note-books on, 596;
    • method of preparing, 597–600, 655,
      • remarks on, 655;
    • the one at Charleston, 599,
      • at Stamford, 599;
    • method of delivering, 600;
    • fruits of, 602;
    • must be delivered immediately, 656;
    • trial sermon, 687.
  • Seward, Wm. H., opinion of, 305.
  • Shakspere, early criticism on, 146.
  • “Shining Shore,” a favorite with, 366, 379.
  • Sickness, thoughts on, 147;
    • his final, 675.
  • Slavery, work done against, at Amherst, 119,
    • • at Indianapolis, 185, 195–197;
    • course on, defined, 217–220, 242;
    • on Church’s timidity towards, 221;
    • Fugitive Slave Law, articles on, 236–238, 240–244;
    • leader against, an acknowledged, 244;
    • pulpit labor against, defence of, 248–252;
    • tenacity of anti-slavery, on cause of, 257,
      • instrumentalities for, use of, 266;
    • Constitution, ballot, Church, as forces against, 267;
    • Christianity against, on power of, 268;
    • battle against, religious element in, 269, 270;
    • on treatment of, 303, 331;
    • military question, a, 331;
    • system of, requires ignorance, 417.
  • Sleep, habits as to, 654.
  • 702South, not safe to visit, 426;
    • on reconstruction of, 453, 458, 461;
    • on kindness to people of (1865), 454;
    • on effect of exclusion of, 459, 468, 473;
    • affection for, 460;
    • faith in honor of, 463;
    • on restoration of States of, 465–468,
      • Northern fear of, 466, 467;
    • to be effected by Republican party, 477;
    • on results to, of elections of 1884, 587;
    • mediation for, 612.
  • Speculative, early aptitude for the, 78, 79.
  • Spiritualism, disbelief in, 363.
  • Sports, youthful, superiority in, 85, 108.
  • Stanton, Edwin M., encouraging note to, reply, 447;
    • requested by, to go to Charleston, 449;
    • telegram from, on Sheridan’s success, 450.
  • Stockton, Col.], recommends to Lincoln, 443.
  • Storrs, Dr. R. S., reasons for not confiding in, 520;
    • attempted reconciliation with, 561.
  • Stowe, Rev. Calvin E., indebtedness to, 137;
    • a joke on, 141.
  • Strength of paternal ancestry of, 19.
  • Studies, in youth, backward in, 70, 74, 102.
  • Study, on wrong method of, 643.
  • Style, literary, remarks on, 644.
  • Sumner-Brooks affair, speech on, 287;
    • article on, 288.
  • Sunday, influences of, when a boy, 62.
  • Synod meeting, description of, 152.
  • Tasks of, in boyhood, 64.
  • Taxes for war, on, 323;
    • Christian’s duty as to, 324.
  • Tea, effect of, 652.
  • Temperance, early work in, 130, 138, 144, 147;
    • in Lawrenceburg, 185;
    • “teetotal” at Oxford, Eng., 345;
    • to his daughter, on practice of, 384;
    • use of liquors as medicine, 652, 653.
  • “Temple Melodies,” compilation of, 363;
    • name omitted from title of, 364.
  • Terre Haute, Ind., reminiscence of, 190–192.
  • Theologian, as a, 602, 603;
    • estimate of, 603.
  • Theology, proposes to find a universal, 570;
    • his influence on, 604;
    • theological disputes, hatred of, 604, 605;
    • dislike of, reason for, 606;
    • future, on the, 609.
  • Thirteenth Regiment, accepts chaplaincy of, 660;
    • sword a source of trouble, 662;
    • military orders, experience with, 662, 663;
    • title in, 663.
  • Tides, youthful definition of, 76.
  • Tilton, Theodore, affection for, 489, 500;
    • first charge of, 493;
    • called on to leave Brooklyn by, 494, 503;
    • efforts to reclaim, 495, 497;
    • opinion of, to Bowen, 503;
    • self-accusations of unintentional wrong to, 505;
    • moral conduct of, deceived in, 509;
    • urges him to break with Mrs. Woodhull, 510;
    • on bad traits of, 516;
    • promise to, as to Mrs. Tilton, 517;
    • payment to, of $5,000, 519;
    • openly charged by, 527;
    • charge changed by, 532;
    • civil suit by, 533.
  • Tilton, Mrs. T., advice asked by, as to separation, 502;
    • letter to, Feb. 17, 1871, 507;
    • letter to, on Woodhull scandal, 513.
  • Tools, readiness with, 64.
  • Travel, foreign, religion weakened by, 384.
  • Trinity, on doctrine of, 607.
  • Tripartite agreement, part in, 512;
    • honored by him alone, 520.
  • Trouble, on surmounting, 374;
    • how affected by, 499.
  • Trouting, letter on, 357.
  • Trust in God, on, 379;
    • how strengthened, 616, 617.
  • Truth, desire for, 212.
  • “Tutor’s Delight,” the, 116.
  • Tweed frauds, denunciations of, 572.
  • Twin sons of, birth of, 352;
    • death of, 357.
  • Undenominational spirit of, 163, 167, 227, 483, 611.
  • Unitarian reaction in Massachusetts, on the, 83;
    • Sabbath-school, on ostracism of a, 355, 356.
  • Vicksburg and Gettysburg, on victories of, 405, 406.
  • War, views on, 312, 313, 398;
    • Christians in, on bearing of, 314;
    • with England, on, 322.
  • Welsh blood in, source of, 19.
  • White Mountains, summer services in, 660.
  • Widowerhood, possible, remark on, 20.
  • Woman, reverence for, 554.
  • Writing-paper, dislike of foreign, 387.
  • Young, fondness for, 184, 185, 203;
    • “Lectures to Young Men,” 199.
• Beecher, Mrs. H. W., an accident to, 385;
  • determination of, 386;
  • Beecher’s, Henry W., letter to, on his health, 653;
  • Lawrenceburg, description of pastorate at, 172,
    • of housekeeping at, 174;
  • retrospect by, of Mr. Beecher’s youth, 121–127;
  • wedding of, 170;
  • journey to West, 171.
• Beecher, John, a pioneer of New Haven Colony, 19.
• Beecher, Joseph, reminiscence of, 19;
  • strength of, 20.
• Beecher, Nathaniel, reminiscence of, 19;
  • strength of, 20.
• 703Beecher, Rev. Lyman, affection of, for his wife, 26.
  • Beecher, Roxana, opinion of, 24, 26.
  • Birth and childhood of, 18.
  • Boston, removal to, 82.
  • Character of, 17, 26, 27.
  • Children of, their regimen, 46;
    • tulip-bulbs, adventure with, 47;
    • at their mother’s death, 49;
    • some amusements of, the cat’s funeral, 56;
    • treatment of, by their father, 57;
    • fishing trip, a, spoiled, 58;
    • teaching of, by their father 58;
    • father’s spirit, influenced by, 68.
  • Cincinnati, household at, 138–140;
    • family meeting at, 142.
  • College, preparation for, 19.
  • Courtship of, 26.
  • Death of, H. W. Beecher on, 681.
  • Duelling, effect of sermon on, 27.
  • East Hampton, life and labors at, 27;
    • departure from, 29.
  • Farm life, disgusted with, 18.
  • Financial difficulties, faith under, 117.
  • Indomitable spirit of, infused into his children, 68, 69.
  • Kindness of, abused, remark on, 659.
  • Lane Seminary, president of, 136, 160;
    • instruction at, method of, 137;
    • heresy, charged with, 151, 160;
    • union of churches, wish for, 160.
  • Letters of, to Roxana Foote, 26, 27.
  • Litchfield, called to, 29;
    • dwelling at, 38, 62,
      • rats in, 63;
    • household at, 38,
      • H. W. Beecher on, 553;
    • ideal home, an, 40;
    • labors at, made a mental stimulus, 58;
    • visit to, in 1857, 373.
  • Marriage of, to Roxana Foote, 27;
    • to Harriet Porter, 53.
  • Missionary societies in Connecticut formed by, 42.
  • New School, battle for, 151.
  • Orthodoxy, zeal for, 82.
  • Plymouth Church, at a revival in, 376.
  • Religious temperament of, 26.
  • Shrewdness of, in H. W. Beecher’s sea project, 90.
  • Society for Prevention of Vice in Connecticut formed by, 42.
  • Synod, moderator of, 152.
  • Temperance, action on, 42.
  • Unitarian reaction, protest against, 82.
  • United States in 1813, remarks on, 41.
  • Woodspell, the yearly, 58.
• Beecher, Roxana, accomplishments of, 23.
  • Ancestry of, 21, 22.
  • Beecher’s, H. W., estimate of, 128;
  • her influence on, 67, 554.
  • Courtship of, 26.
  • Death of, 48.
  • East Hampton, L. I., life in, 27.
  • Education of, how acquired, 23.
  • Episcopal Church, member of, 23, 24.
  • Letters of, to Lyman Beecher, 26.
  • Love of, for her husband, 26.
  • Parents of, loyal to king, 23.
  • Personal characteristics of, 23, 24.
  • Recollections of, 47.
  • Religious temperament of, 24, 26.
  • School of, in East Hampton, 28.
  • Science, interest in, 40.
  • Trials of, some, 40.
• Beecher, Rev. Thomas K., reminiscences by, of Henry and Charles, 90, 138.
• Benton, Lot, Lyman Beecher brought up by, 18.
• Big Bantam Lake (Litchfield), 31.
• Blaine, James G., H. W. Beecher on, 576, 577.
• Blake, G. Faulkner, in ransom of slaves, 294.
• Boscobel—see Peekskill.
• Boston, Mass., bells of, 83;
  • Beecher’s, H. W., life in, 90–92,
    • adventure with cross woman of, 118,
    • rumors in, against, 534, 546,
    • rumors refuted, 535;
  • reception in, at lecture, 565;
  • Beecher, Lyman, removes to, 82,
    • dwelling at, 85;
  • feuds of, juvenile, 85;
  • Navy-Yard of, H. W. Beecher’s enthusiasm over, 84,
    • purloins cannon-ball from, 87;
  • ships of, impress H. W. Beecher, 84;
  • sport of, a juvenile, 85.
• Bowen, Henry C., H. W. Beecher’s dispute with, as to accounts, 489,
  • • scandalous hints concerning, 490,
    • hatred of, intensified by resignation, 492,
    • bitter enemy to, 494,
    • promises support to, 504,
    • renews charges against, 542,
    • proposed committee on, 543;
  • card of, on black-listing, 247;
  • Conspiracy, part in, 493;
  • Plymouth Church, dropped by, 543;
  • Tilton, Theodore, early troubles with, 491,
    • reasons for reducing, 503,
    • charged by, with scandalous stories, 511;
  • tripartite agreement, part in, 512.
• Brice, Pomona, help afforded to, 293.
• Brooklyn, N. Y., H. W. Beecher called to, 187, 210–216,
  • • speech at, on return from England, 438,
    • in answer to Wendell Phillips, 458;
  • Common Council of, tender reception to Mr. Beecher, 672;
  • Fourteenth Regiment, equipment of, 316;
  • martial spirit in, in 1861, 314;
  • services in, at death of Mr. Beecher, 680;
  • 704slaves ransomed in, 292–300;
  • Thirteenth Regiment of, elects Mr. Beecher chaplain, 660.
• Brooks, Preston S., attack of, on Charles Sumner, 286;
  • Mr. Beecher on, 287, 288.
• Brown, John, H. W. Beecher on, 301, 302;
  • name of, a war-cry, 301;
  • sketch of, 300.
• Brussels, Belgium, visit to, of Mr. Beecher, 403.
• Buchanan, Pres., administration of, 305;
  • election of, 291;
  • fast-day of, 307.
• Budington, Rev. W. I., Advisory Council (1876), refuses to attend, 544;
  • Beecher, H. W., enmity to, 521;
  • church of, divided on calling council, 523,
    • protest on, 524,
    • letter to, from Mr. Beecher, on protest, 526.
• Bull Run defeat, H. W. Beecher on, 320;
  • effect of, at North, 319, 320.
• Burgess, Deacon, annually nominated for Legislature, 22.
• Burr, Betsey, 38.