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 Henry Ward Beecher: a study of his perso 
 
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 Patriotic Addresses 
 
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 FORDS, HOWARD, & HULBERT, 
 
 30 Lafayette Place, New York. 
 
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 / ' ' / 
 
 C 
 
 x:^ 
 
 F'OFlDS, HOWARD ■ 
 
HENRY WARD BEECHER 
 
 OF HIS PERSONALITY, CAREER, AND 
 INFLUENCE IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS 
 
 By JOHN R. HOWARD 
 
 NEW YORK 
 FORDS, HOWARD, & HULBERT 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 The activity of Henry Ward Beecher in public affairs 
 grew directly out of his natural endowments and training, 
 his acquired powers, and his religious impulse to regard 
 man as God's child, and God as Father; consequently, this 
 sketch of his part in the political life of the country has 
 involved a consideration of his personality, and of the 
 education and experiences that made him what he became 
 — in brief, the history of his life. 
 
 In 1887 the present writer edited and published a col- 
 lection of Mr. Beecher's " Patriotic Addresses in America 
 and England, from 1850 to 1885," and prefaced it with 
 the " Review of His Personality and Influence in Public 
 Affairs," which constitutes this separate publication. Orig- 
 inally intended to cover only his political career, it grew, 
 almost by necessity, to a somewhat larger form by reason 
 of the desire to show the genuine springs of his action 
 and the steady consistency of his course. The whole line 
 of his public life for fifty years was singularly undeviating, 
 as that of an actfve helper of the oppressed, a conservator 
 of the good, and an inspirer of the best, in man. 
 
 His politics — like his religion, his literary labors, his 
 pastoral methods, his power as an orator in pulpit and 
 on platform — were, in a peculiar sense, the man. 
 
 For those, therefore, who wish a concise view of Henry 
 Ward Beecher and his work — and many inquiries made of 
 the publishing house with which the writer is connected 
 show that there are such — this biographical sketch will to 
 some extent, it is hoped, serve a good purpose. If its 
 perusal shall also arouse a desire to know more of the man 
 by reading the noble " Addresses " which it was written 
 to introduce, it will Serve an end still higher. 
 
 J. R. H. 
 New York, March, 1891. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 1. Essential Principles ii 
 
 2. Heredity, Training, and Education, . . . . _ . 15 
 
 3. Ten Years of Missionary Work, 44 
 
 4. Plymouth Church : Personal Traits, .... 55 
 
 5. Political Career, 78 
 
 6. Strength and Weakness, 134 
 
 7. Conclusion 155 
 
 PORTRAITS OF MR. BEECHER. 
 
 At the Age of Forty-three (1855), Frontispiece. 
 
 Sixty-five (1878), 134 
 
 Seventy-three (1886) 155 
 
 Manuscript Fac-Simile 112 
 
 First page of Notes for Speech in Brooklyn Academy of Music, after pub- 
 lication of Cleveland Letters, 1866. 
 
HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES. 
 
 John Ruskin, in the preface to his book entitled, "The 
 Two Paths," on the importance of organic form in archi- 
 tectural decorative design, has this strong passage: — 
 
 " We are all of us willing enough to accept dead truths, or blunt 
 ones ; which can be fitted harmoniously into spare niches, or 
 shrouded and coffined at once out of the way, we holding com- 
 placently the cemetery keys and supposing we have learned 
 something. But a sapling truth, with earth at its root and 
 blossom on its branches ; or a trenchant truth, that can cut its 
 way through bars and sods ; most men, it seems to me, dislike 
 the sight or entertainment of, if by any means such guest or 
 vision may be avoided. And indeed this is no wonder ; for one 
 such truth, thoroughly accepted, coflnects itself strangely with 
 others, and there is no saying what it may lead to." 
 
 The central element of Henry Ward Beecher's character 
 was his sensitiveness to truth. From his youth he 
 eagerly desired it, earnestly sought it, welcomed it with 
 delight, and then poured out his whole soul in using it 
 for the good of man, — which he always believed to be the 
 cause of God. To a remarkable extent, for one who 
 worked in the midst of men and along the lines of social 
 forces, he laid his course in obedience to principle, hold- 
 ing a sturdy loyalty to it amid all the swaying passions 
 and policies by which he was surrounded. In one sense 
 this was no credit to him, since it was his natural temper- 
 ament. As he said in reference to facing the stormy 
 English meetings: " I have expressed my views in any 
 audience, and it never cost me a struggle. I never could 
 help doing it." However, now that he is gone, our 
 
12 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 inquiry does not so much take the attitude of praise or 
 blame: we are concerned only to know what the man 
 was; what were the relative points of strength and of 
 weakness in his make-up; and how these combined with 
 the movements and events around him, to bring about 
 the unquestionable resultant of a personal influence, 
 wider and more potent than that of any other American of 
 his time. If that seems a strong statement, it must be 
 considered that his influence — whatever it was — at no time 
 owed anything to the accidents of inherited station, or the 
 great leverage of public office, by which individuals may 
 wield the powers of a people, but was the immediate effect 
 of his own personality. 
 
 The special intent of this volume is to present a general 
 view of Mr. Beecher's career with reference to the great 
 political revolution which took place in the United States 
 while he was in public life. But to separate his political 
 activity from the rest of his life — domestic, social, and 
 religious — is impossible, if one would get at the real sources 
 of his conduct, the genuine secrets of his power. The 
 natural endowments of the man; the influences under 
 which he grew; the successive fields of his labor, with 
 their opportunities and 'limitations; the unfolding of his 
 character and capabilities; his modes of working, accumu- 
 lation of knowledges, general and special preparations, 
 tenses and moods of utterance; the gradual enlargement 
 of his influence; the social and ecclesiastical and political 
 entanglements which at times hampered his course; the 
 steady outflow of energy, of thought, of stimulating im- 
 pulse, in harmony with the humanitarian movement of the 
 age, which distinguished him to the very end of his long 
 life, — these considerations are all inseparable and essential 
 in understanding any phase of his career. i 
 
 His public utterances were all the outgrowth of the one 
 grand theme of his thought and faith: The fatherhood of 
 God and the worth of man as God's child, — not only the 
 core but the very sum and substance of his teaching, 
 from beginning to end. Whatever the special topic, that 
 underlying principle was sure to be found at the bottom. 
 
ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES. 13 
 
 However variant the visible pattern — and surely few minds 
 since Shakespeare's have laid hold on such a wondrous 
 number and diversity of matters for treatment — the warp 
 and backing was that maxim of his life. Whether upon 
 his own platform in Plymouth pulpit, or lecturing on art 
 or literature or economics, making an after-dinner speech, 
 or writing a novel or a trifling paper or a letter of travel, 
 thundering through times of war and commotion, or dis- 
 cussing policies and parties in the piping times of peace, 
 — his work was all surrounded and permeated with an 
 atmosphere of the brooding love of God and the duty of 
 *man to man. 
 
 An amusing instance of this characteristic is related.* At 
 the lecture he delivered in Dublin, on " The Wastes and 
 Burdens of Society," where the local magnates, although 
 desirous of hearing the celebrated American orator, were 
 in great trepidation lest he should say something about 
 religion to the distaste of Irish Catholics, or about British 
 politics, to the disturbance of civil order and governmental 
 discipline in that turbulent town, the chairman introduced 
 him as follows: — 
 
 "Ladies and gentlemen, I have the honor to introduce to 
 you a distinguished orator from Yankeeland. Mr. Beecher is 
 not on this platform in his clerical character, so we are not to be 
 treated to any exposition of his theological sentiments. Mr. 
 Beecher is not here as a politician, and therefore we will not hear 
 from him any exposition of his political principles. [Hear, hear, 
 and applause^ But Mr. Beecher is here to deliver an address of 
 more than ordinary social importance. As a well-known philan- 
 thropist, from his long experience, from the wonderful abilities 
 the Great Master has gifted him with, and from his well known 
 character as one of the most distinguished orators, we may an- 
 ticipate, I think, an address — a lecture — that shall not only be 
 instructive but delightful. I have great pleasure in introducing 
 Mr. Beecher to your notice this evening." 
 
 Mr. Beecher, on coming forward, said: — 
 
 " I have been very kindly introduced by the distinguished and 
 
 * " A Summer in England (i886) with Henry Ward Beecher." Edited 
 by James B. Pond. New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert. 
 
14 HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 
 
 honorable gentleman who has accompanied me, and therefore 1 
 accept the position assigned. I have not come to speak on the- 
 ology ; and you shall never know how much you have missed. 
 [Laughter^ I have not come to speak on politics. I have enough 
 of that in my own country \laughter\ and even if I knew about 
 your politics, I should think it very inexpedient, as one born 
 abroad, to meddle with local affairs and local questions. I know 
 that it is not necessary for one to know much about politics in 
 order to make a good speaker ; but, nevertheless, I accept the 
 delimitation, and there is nothing left of me but this — that i 
 am a man. That's enough. 'A man's a man for a' that.' And &t 
 to the other things, I give them a go-by, in the hope that some 
 twenty or thirty years hence I may revisit you, and that you then 
 will be very glad to hear my opinions about those other sub- 
 jects." 
 
 Mr. Beecher gave the lecture in one of his own peculiar 
 moods, caused by the attempt to confine him within certain 
 bounds. Mr. Pond in telling the story says: "The audi- 
 ence soon had reason to believe that he had in some way, . 
 perhaps unconsciously, woven a great deal of religion and 
 politics into the lecture; at least the chairman told me 
 after the lecture that he could see and feel it all through." 
 
 And so it was, at all times. His religion was not a mat- 
 ter for Sunday performance; it was that which filled his 
 life and thought, for which and by which — as at once an 
 aim and an inspiration— he did that which he found to do. 
 
 In a brief sketch, such as this must be, it is evident that 
 the elements of the character, training, and general career 
 of so large and effective a man must be but lightly touched 
 upon rather than thoroughly studied; yet the present 
 writer holds a consideration of them necessary to a proper 
 comprehension of Mr. Beecher's course in connection with 
 civil affairs. That it will be adequate or complete is not 
 to be expected; such is a labor for broader powers and 
 later years: but that it should be of interest, and of use in 
 understanding the essential qualities of Henry Ward 
 Beecher's great mind and greater heart, is the design and 
 hope of the writer. 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 15 
 
 II. 
 
 HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION, 
 
 The familiar thought that great men, however loftily 
 they may tower above their contemporaries, are yet the 
 product of their own times, has been recently applied 
 to Mr. Beecher by the London Globe, a conservative Tory 
 paper, having little sympathy with anything that he repre- 
 sented. It says: — 
 
 " He may be taken as a conspicuous illustration of the view that 
 there is such a thing as greatness of personality, as distinguished 
 from greatness in any particular capacity. ***** Henry 
 Ward Beecher was the leading type of his own people in his own 
 day ; and as such he will doubtless be remembered." 
 
 Indeed, it is as one peculiarly representing the highest 
 ideal of American theories and practical citizenship that 
 the man must be considered. 
 
 Henry Ward Beecher was a type of the best American- 
 ism, by his ancestry and birthright. A widow, Mrs. Han- 
 nah Beecher, his earliest ancestor in this country, and her 
 son John, came here from Kent, England, in 1638 with 
 Master John Davenport's company at the time of the settle- 
 ment of New Haven, Connecticut; and Andrew Ward, 
 another of the same company, was his ancestor on his 
 mother's side. He himself mentions, in one of his speeches 
 in England during the war, the fact that his great-great- 
 grandmother, Mary Roberts, was a full-blooded Welsh 
 woman; and he felt that he owed no inconsiderable part of 
 himself to the Welsh blood in his veins. 
 
 John Beecher, the immigrant, and his descendants, Jo- 
 seph, Nathaniel, and David the father of Lyman, were 
 
1 6 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 mighty men in stature and strength, Nathaniel and David 
 being blacksmiths. Henry Ward was the eighth child of 
 Lyman Beecher and Roxanna Foote, the latter of whom 
 was a descendant of Andrew Ward, already mentioned. 
 They were married in 1799; and Lyman Beecher, who 
 brought the combative and somewhat disputatious tem- 
 perament of his father, the blacksmith, into the profession 
 of the ministry, settled first at East Hampton, Long Island, 
 and twelve years later moved to Litchfield, Connecticut. 
 Here, on the 24th of June, 1813, Henry Ward was born. 
 
 Thus we find him, at the outset, an offshoot of the sturdy 
 English stock, infused with the highly sensitive and poetic 
 Welsh temperament, planted on a stony, breezy, sunshiny 
 hill of New England. His early years were to be spent 
 amid that characteristically Puritan people, and subject to 
 all the bracing atmospheric conditions of that time and 
 region. 
 
 The training of children in these days, in respect to both 
 their social, mental, and moral development, is so rich and 
 full of interest on every side, that it is almost impossible 
 to conceive what it was in Henry Ward Beecher's child- 
 hood. It is pitiful to look back at such a picture as Mr. 
 Beecher has drawn of his own early school-days. From 
 our point of view, it is hard to believe that children were 
 so neglected; and, on the other hand, looking forward from 
 that, it is hard to see how such a starved childhood could 
 have grown to such a glorious manhood: — 
 
 " It was our misfortune, in boyhood, to go to a district school. 
 A little, square, pine building, blazing in the sun, stood upon the 
 highway, without a tree for shade or shadow 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 there, in summer, were all the chips of the winter's 
 wood. 
 
 " In winter we were squeezed into the recess of the furthest cor- 
 ner, 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 read and spelled twice a day, — unless something 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING , AND EDUCATION. 17 
 
 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 had of it, indeed ! 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 hickory ferule on the desk with a clap that sent 
 shivers through our hearts to think how it 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 ! ' Stillness would last for a few minutes ; but little boys' 
 memories are not capacious. Moreover, some of the boys had 
 great gifts of mischief, and some of 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 to laugh 
 at. 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 stinging slap 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, another, touching off the others 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 fib, however uninten- 
 tional; for we never failed to do just so again, and that about 
 once an hour all day long. 
 
 " A woman kept the summer school, sharp, precise, unsympa- 
 thetic, keen, and untiring. Of all ingenious ways of fretting little 
 boys, doubtless her ways were the most expert. Not a tree was 
 there 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 warm pine-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 in our day it already wore cuttings and carv- 
 ings 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 from 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. 
 
1 8 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 " We envied the flies — merry fellows, bouncing about, tasting 
 of that apple-skin, patting away at this crumb of bread ; now out 
 of 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 little real round and round buzz, up, down, this 
 way, that way, and every way. O, 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 Polyglott, 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 on the 
 medley of boys and girls. Long before we knew that it was in 
 Scripture, we sighed — O, 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 scarcely 
 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 to see poor little fellows roast in those boy-traps called dis- 
 trict schools." 
 
 Perhaps it would be hard to find anywhere a more apt 
 and complete summing up of the characteristics with which 
 this boy started life: physically strong, full of life, with 
 keenly sensitive nerves, quick to see and to feel the influ- 
 ences of nature, especially in its aspects of poetry and free- 
 dom from constraint, with a heart swiftly responsive to 
 sympathetic treatment, combustible with merriment and 
 with tears, and a soul that instinctively reached out toward 
 the beautiful and the good. That which does not appear 
 at this time, and which must have been very slow in mak- 
 ing its appearance, was the remarkable mental capacity of 
 which the man was a notable example throughout his en- 
 tire life, but which the boy seems to have shown no hint of. 
 
 What he received from his father and mother by direct 
 inheritance certainly cannot be overlooked; and it is worth 
 more than a passing glance to consider what was the do- 
 mestic atmosphere in which he grew through boyhood and 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 19 
 
 youth to early manhood, — if only to show the shallowness 
 of the small critics of our day, who because this great 
 original thinker grew out luxuriantly in all directions i)e- 
 yond the limits of the trellises on which their own slender 
 vines were trained, are fain to say, " He is a great talker; 
 but he knows nothing of theology; " the fact being that in 
 Henry Ward Beecher's youth, in old Connecticut, theology 
 was the food he ate, and the milk he drank, and the air 
 he breathed, and the ground he trod, from his very earliest 
 years. Theology was the only thing that he got a surfeit of, 
 and doubtless it was out of his own familiarity with it, and 
 his final perception of its barrenness for good in practical 
 labor upon the souls of men, that he so impatiently went 
 beyond it. 
 
 Dr. Lyman Beecher was a born belligerent. He was a 
 man of thorough theological training himself, under Dr. 
 Dwight of New Haven, and in the controversies and feuds 
 of the Congregational and Presbyterian and Unitarian 
 churches of his day he took no uncertain part. He was a 
 revivalist, an ardent laborer in the Temperance cause, and 
 in every direction one of the foremost clergymen of his time. 
 A sermon preached in 1810 on the killing of Alexander 
 Hamilton by Aaron Burr attracted special attention; and his 
 famous Six Sermons on Intemperance (1814) were power- 
 ful factors in the reform then moving throughout New 
 England. His family was large; his income of three hun- 
 dred dollars, after five years increased to four hundred, 
 gave even in those times a narrow margin. He was eccen- 
 tric and peculiar, and absent-minded; in everything except 
 the personal influencing of men to right living, the discussion 
 of theoretical questions in theology and practical problems 
 in morals, an eminently unpractical man. He carefully 
 thought out his sermons, but usually preached them without 
 notes, pouring them forth with great vehemence, and also 
 with great effect upon his hearers. Keenly alive to the influ- 
 ences of music, and thoroughly unconventional, so far as 
 outward appearances were concerned, he was accustomed 
 to relieve the tension of his mind and nerves after preach- 
 ing by violin-playing or, as like as not, by going to the 
 
20 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 wood-pile and sawing wood. He was a man of tremen- 
 dous impulses, and lightning-like changes of mood; a rec- 
 ognized thinker, a powerful orator, a genius of many sides. 
 Though by no means a symmetrical character, he was an 
 eminent force for good in his day. 
 
 " In spite of Dr. Beecher's musical sensibility, he was 
 curiously lacking in any perception of beauty in art, and 
 his son Henry Ward's love for all such matters in later 
 years was one of the things that he could not understand. 
 
 If the sources of impulsive power, the broad sense of 
 morality, the mental alertness, the ardent earnestness for 
 man, the lofty aspiration for Heavenly things, the rich 
 humor, the quick wit, the careless freedom from conven- 
 tionality, the subtle nerve-sensitiveness to music, and the 
 magnificent physical frame, elasticity of muscle, and per- 
 fection of organic health, came from the father, the mother 
 of Henry Ward Beecher contributed some elements with- 
 out which he would not have been the man he was. 
 
 The great men have usually risen from families unknown 
 before their advent; yet, whenever a man's career has made 
 it worth while to seek out his progenitors, it is usually 
 found that he had a mother of remarkable qualities. 
 
 Roxanna Foote was a woman of rare nature. Miss 
 Catharine Beecher, the eldest of Dr. Beecher's thirteen 
 children, in her " Educational Reminiscences " speaks of 
 certain traits in the characters of both the mother and 
 father which are worth notice. The mother, she says, had 
 " a high ideal of excellence in whatever she attempted, a 
 habit of regarding all knowledge with reference to its 
 practical usefulness, and remarkable perseverance." She 
 gives illustrations of Mrs. Beecher's esthetic taste and 
 positive artistic talent, in making and painting a car- 
 pet from a useless bale of cotton that Dr. Beecher had 
 bought for its cheapness, and in painting and decorating a 
 set of old wooden chairs, in her beautiful needlework, her 
 remarkable paintings of fruits, flowers, and birds, and her 
 miniatures on ivory, all accomplished when the young 
 mother of four or five children, a housekeeper, and a 
 teacher of a boarding school. 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 21 
 
 The father passionately loved children, but the mother, 
 though benevolent and tender, was not demonstrative. 
 The father was imaginative, impulsive, and averse to study; 
 while the mother calmly enjoyed both studying and teach- 
 ing. The father, although profuse and poetical, was a 
 trained dialectician; and yet the mother, untrained, he re- 
 garded as fully his equal in argument. She had a refined 
 and shrinking- nature, but in emergencies showed a native 
 strength and power of command. 
 
 Mrs. Beecher's spiritual traits impressed themselves upon 
 her children, but she gave them also their characteristic 
 physiognomy; for the " Beecher look," so familiar to the 
 public in the faces of Dr. Edward, Miss Catharine, Henry 
 Ward, Mrs. Stowe, and others of the elder group, is not at 
 all Beecher, but distinctively Foote, and may be seen — espe- 
 cially the fine nose, the full eye, the mobile, sensitive 
 mouth, and the general contour of the mask — in many 
 members of the old Connecticut family of that name. It 
 was the Beecher power infusing the Foote refinement that 
 found its consummate products in Harriet and Henry. 
 
 Mr. Beecher once told the present writer that his father 
 was very irascible. " One day," said he, " being much an- 
 noyed by some hogs that kept getting into his garden, he 
 seized his gun and rushed to the door. My mother anx- 
 iously followed, and cried, ' Oh Father, don't shoot the 
 poor things ! ' He flashed back at her, ' Woman, go into 
 the house ! ' and when he was telling me of it years after- 
 ward he said : ' Without a word or look she turned, 
 quietly, majestically, and went in — but she didn't get in 
 before I did. I threw my arms around her in an agony of 
 self-reproach, and cried, " Forgive me — Oh forgive me ! " 
 She uttered no word, but she looked at me like a queen — 
 and smiled — and kissed my face: my passion was gone 
 and my offense forgiven.' Up to the last of his life he 
 never spoke of her but with intensest admiration and lov- 
 ing remembrance. She must have been a noblewoman." 
 
 This lovely mother died when little Henry was but 
 three years old. His remembrances of her were vague, 
 but full of tender and beautiful imaginings. He seems to 
 
22 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 have cherished his slight memories and what he could learn 
 of her, as a beautiful ideal which, throughout his life, ap- 
 pears in many exquisite passages of writing or of speech. 
 
 In one of his sermons occurs the following: " I can 
 never say enough for women for my mother's sake, for my 
 sisters' sake, for the sake of others that gathered in the 
 days of my infancy about me, in return for what they 
 have interpreted to me of the beauty of holiness, of the 
 fullness of love, arid of the heavenliness of those elements 
 from which we are to interpret Heaven itself." 
 
 So much, then, for what Mr. Beecher inherited from his 
 parents. Upon the death of his mother there came into 
 his family another person of whom the man was never 
 tired of saying beautiful things, as, for instance, this allu- 
 sion to her in his "Fruits, Flowers, and Farming," — "My 
 dear Aunt Esther, who brought me up, — a woman so good 
 and modest that she will spend ages in Heaven wonder- 
 ing how it happened that she ever got there, while the 
 angels will always be wondering why she was not there 
 from all eternity." 
 
 This excellent and beloved woman, a sister of Dr. 
 Beecher, came to take charge of the family after Mrs. 
 Beecher's death. A close economist, an accomplished cook, 
 systematical and neat in all family arrangements, but 
 gentle, loving, and a very soul of brooding motherly kind- 
 ness, her well-ordered household moved along with Dr. 
 Beecher's impulsive nature in perfect harmony. At the 
 end of the year a second mother was brought to the 
 home, of whom Miss Catharine says that she 
 
 " Introduced a more complete and refined style of housekeep- 
 ing, which she had acquired or observed in the families of her 
 two uncles, Gov. King, of Maine, and Rufus King, a former am- 
 bassador of the United States to England. Under her quiet and 
 lady-like rule, I again was trained to habits of system, order, and 
 neatness, entirely foreign to my natural inherited traits, as it re- 
 spects personal habits, while in the most unfavorable circum- 
 stances, she was a model of propriety and good taste. . . . She 
 had a most sweet and gentle speech, which, even in the most try- 
 ing circumstances, never became loud or harsh." 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 23 
 
 Mrs. Beecher, in writing to her former home about this 
 family into which she had come, says: — 
 
 " It seems the highest happiness of the children (the elder ones 
 especially) to have a reading circle, and they have all, I think, 
 fine capacities for learning. Edward probably will be a great 
 scholar. Catharine is a fine looking girl, and in her mind I find 
 all that I expected. Mary will make a fine woman; will be 
 rather handsome than otherwise. The four youngest are very 
 pretty. George comes next to Mary. 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." 
 
 Now, to add to the foregoing pictures of the family, take 
 this sentence from Miss Catharine again. Speaking of her 
 first experience in school teaching she says: "The only 
 pleasant recollection is that of my own careful and exact 
 training under my most accurate and faithful brother Ed- 
 ward, and my reproduction of it to my sister Harriet and 
 two others of my brightest pupils." 
 
 Thus, though it would appear that the early school- 
 ing of little Henry was less than nothing, the qualities 
 that he inherited from his parents, and the advantages 
 of mutual training, of intelligent conversation, of varied 
 reading in the midst of a family circle of unusual aptitude 
 and varied acquirements, gave him advantages of no mean 
 quality; while it is not at all unlikely that the early neglect 
 of his little mind gave him a chance to solidify and develop 
 that splendid physique which after all was the source of 
 much of his power. 
 
 The society in Litchfield at the time of his youth was of a 
 rather high intellectual grade, there being in the town a well 
 known law school and several other institutions of learning; 
 it was an era of what Emerson calls " plain living and high 
 thinking." This was in one respect unfavorable to the 
 development of the boy, inasmuch as it tended to separate 
 the father's intellectual sympathies from his children, 
 leaving them largely to shift for themselves. It was, how- 
 ever, but according to the temper of the time; and the con- 
 ditions of their Litchfield home resulted in an atmosphere 
 highly favorable to the growth of character, the honorable 
 
24 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 examples of life about him exerting an influence upon his 
 whole future life. He has several times expressed his 
 gratitude to God that his early life was passed without 
 knowledge of impurity or vice of any kind. He was sin- 
 gularly favored by his surroundings in that regard; and 
 his knowledge of such things, utilized in later years with 
 great dramatic power, in his " Lectures to Young Men," 
 not only, but in all his course of preaching, resulted from 
 a careful gathering of information in conversation with 
 those who knew. For instance, his apparent familiarity 
 with the modes and influences of gambling, in his Indian- 
 apolis lectures to young men, came from a series of talks 
 which he had with a gambler in that city, with whom he 
 sought an acquaintance for the express purpose of learn- 
 ing something about the facts, the bearings of which he 
 was going to discuss. So that, although he had never 
 been inside of a gambling house, and did not even know 
 one card from another, his own intuitions of human nature, 
 his quick sympathy with others and power to put himself 
 by imagination in their places, enabled him to clothe the 
 bare bones of fact with such living power that the pictures 
 were recognized as truthful and vivid to the last degree. 
 
 He says in one place: " I thank God for two things — 
 first that I was born and bred in the country, of parents 
 that gave me a sound constitution and a noble example. 
 
 I never can pay back what I owe to my parents 
 
 And I am thankful that I was brought up in circumstances 
 where I never became acquainted with wickedness." 
 And again: " 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 I cannot express to God the thanks which I 
 owe my mother, and to my father, and to the great house- 
 hold of sisters and brothers among whom I lived. And 
 the secondary knowledge of those wicked things which I 
 have gained in later years in a professional way, I gained 
 under such guards that it was not harmful to me." 
 
 Combative as Dr. Beecher was, there must have been in 
 him much of the power of sweetness and self-control which 
 the son so markedly exhibited during his own season of 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 25 
 
 greatest tribulation. In a sermon on " The Moral Teach- 
 ing of Suffering," Mr. Beecher says: — 
 
 " I recollect distinctly, on one occasion, when I was not more 
 than six years old, that a man of great violence of temper came to 
 see my father, and rated him with such a scolding as I had never 
 heard. I looked at my father with amazement, as he sat perfectly 
 still and tranquil. When the man had done, and felt relieved, 
 father began, in the gentlest manner, to say to him, ' Well, if all 
 you say is true, I think you are right in the severity of your re- 
 marks ; but I suppose that if in any regard you are not correct, 
 you are willing to be set right.' ' Yes,' said the man with a growl, 
 'of course I am.' 'Well, will you allow me to make one state- 
 ment ? ' said father, humbling himself before the man. ' Yes.' So 
 father began with a little matter, and stated it ; and then he went 
 a little further ; and then a little further ; until, by and by, the 
 man began to lose color, and at last broke out, ' I have been all 
 wrong in this matter ; I do not understand it.' After he had gone 
 away, father said to me, in a sort of casual manner, ' Give up, and 
 beat 'em.' I got an idea of self-restraint under provocation, which 
 I never could have got by all the instruction in the world which 
 came to me merely in the form of ideas, and in picture-forms 
 and fables ; I had before me the sight of my father suffering — for 
 his pride was naturally touched (though you might not think it 
 from his posterity, yet there was pride in my father to some ex- 
 tent); he felt it keenly; and under the keenness of the feeling he 
 still maintained perfect calmness and perfect sweetness. He 
 overcame the man by suffering. He suffered reproach and abuse, 
 and maintained himself under them." 
 
 It will not do in this connection to omit mention of 
 Charles Smith, an old negro who used to saw wood for 
 Dr. Beecher, and do odd " chores " about the place, and 
 to whom Mr. Beecher has frequently alluded in terms of 
 profound affection and gratitude. Little Henry occupied 
 the same room with him, and records the undying im- 
 pression made upon him by the man's genuine piety, 
 lovely character, and profound enjoyment of his religion. 
 Mr. Beecher says: "Every night he would set the candle 
 at the head of his bed and pray, and sing, and laugh, and 
 I bear record that his praying made a profound impression 
 upon my mind. I never thought whether it was right or 
 wrong, I only thought, ' How that man does enjoy it ! 
 
2 6 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 What enjoyment there must be in such prayer as his.' I 
 gained more from that man of the idea of the desirableness 
 of prayer, than I ever did from my father or mother. My 
 father was never an ascetic, he had no sympathy with any- 
 thing of a monkish tendency; and yet this poor man, 
 more than he, led me to see that there should be real 
 overflowing gladness and thanksgiving in prayer." 
 
 He was a shy and diffident boy; his natural articulation 
 was thick and indistinct; his memory was poor, and to ali 
 influences except those of nature without and the affec- 
 tionate appeals of domestic love within the home circle, he 
 seems to have been rather dull than bright. When he 
 was ten years old he was put in the young ladies' school, 
 kept by his sister Catharine, in Hartford, where among 
 forty girls he was the only boy. One who knew his early 
 days writes: — 
 
 " Here his mirthfulness began to develop very rapidly. He kept 
 the little company of thirty or forty girls in continuous roars of 
 laughter. His store of fun was exhaustless. The school was di- 
 vided into two divisions in grammar, with leaders on either side, 
 and at certain periods public examinations were held, when the 
 successful competitors were suitably rewarded. On such occa- 
 sions Henry was not wanted by either division, as he would in- 
 variably throw the whole division into convulsive merriment. 
 One day his sister took him aside to a private apartment to 
 drill him in the rules and definitions, which he found almost 
 impossible to commit to memory. ' Now, Henry,' said the 
 teacher, '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 a 
 men, can you .? ' ' Yes, I can i^y Amen too,' said the mischievous 
 little rogue. 'Father always says it at the end of his prayers.' 
 ' Come, Henry, don't be always joking ; now decline he. Nomi- 
 native he, possessive his, objective him. You see his is possess- 
 ive. Now, you can say his book, but you can't say him book.' 
 ' Yes, I do say hymn-book too,' said the incipient scholar, with a 
 cunning, quizzical little smile. At this point the teacher, failing 
 to contain herself any longer, burst into laughter, which pleased 
 him immensely. ' But now, Henry, seriously, do attend to the 
 active and passive voice. Now, / strike is active, you see, be- 
 cause 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.'" 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 27 
 
 After a year of Hartford he was sent to the little town 
 of Bethlehem, not far from Litchfield, to attend a school 
 kept by the Rev. Mr. Langdon, where he gained but little 
 except the further development of his love of outdoor 
 study and familiarity with the life of nature. 
 
 At twelve, he was plunged into an entirely new envi- 
 ronment, by the removal of his father to Boston, to take 
 the pastorate of the Park Street Congregational Church, 
 Here he was confined among streets and house-walls, not 
 only, but also still further imprisoned by being placed in 
 the Boston Latin School, which, although it did give him 
 the rudiments of Latin grammar, gave him but little else, 
 except a sense of restraint and an irrepressible desire of 
 outbreaking rebellion. 
 
 Boston days, however, did really give him an uplift. 
 
 " A green, healthy, country lad, with a round, full, red-cheeked 
 face, at about thirteen years of age we entered this city of mar- 
 vels. How fast our heart beat, on Sunday morning, to hear so 
 many bells clamoring all together and filling the heavens with 
 calls to worship. One solitary bell had we been used to hear; 
 one sweet bell, that rolled out its tones for a mile around and 
 more, rising and falling as the wind blew or lulled, and having 
 the whole air to itself, to make its own music in. This jangle 
 and sweet dissonance of Boston bells was among the first things 
 that touched the secret spring of fancy, and sent us up into 
 dreams and imaginings. . . . Next to Boston bells were Bos- 
 ton ships. We shall not 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 hori- 
 zon, and all that we had ever read of buccaneers, of naval battle-., 
 of fleets of merchantmen, of explorations into strange seas, amon _' 
 rare and curious things, rose up in a cloud of mixed and chang- 
 ing fancies, until we scarcely knevv whether we were in the body 
 or out." 
 
 He mentions also the Charlestown Navy Yard, with long 
 rows of unmounted cannon; the mounted sea-batteries; 
 clambering all over the men-of-war building in the ship- 
 house, and the dismantled ships that lay against the pier 
 head. The result of all this was not only the unconscious 
 filling of his imagination with material for future use, but 
 
28 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 the arousing in him of an intense desire and firm determi- 
 nation to go to sea. 
 
 Here the father showed his tact in management by his 
 skillful dealing with the boy. He granted cheerfully the 
 lad's wish to go to sea, but said, " Of course you do not 
 want to be a common sailor ? " "No, sir, I want to be a mid- 
 shipman, and after that a commodore." " Yes, yes," an- 
 swered the father, " well, to do that you must study mathe- 
 ■natics and navigation, and all that." 
 
 And thus the young fellow went with cordial zest to 
 Amherst, Mass., where at the Mount Pleasant academy, 
 under the tuition of Mr. Fitzgerald, a West Point graduate 
 whose manly ways captivated him, he worked hard and 
 really made excellent progress in mathematics; and this, 
 not mechanically, but as the West Point fashion is, thor- 
 oughly, and with understanding. "You must not only 
 know, but you must know that you know," was Mr. Fitz- 
 gerald's dictum; and the boy's knowledge was frequently 
 tested controversially by his instructor, to whom, as 
 Mr. Beecher has said in later years, he felt that he owed 
 his habit of becoming well - grounded in facts for the 
 formation of his opinions, and his power to freely and 
 good-naturedly sustain his positions in the face of storm 
 and argument. 
 
 At this same school, also, he received a training of in- 
 calculable benefit at the hands of Professor John E. Lovell, 
 the elocutionist. In his " Yale Lectures on Preaching " 
 Mr. Beecher says: — 
 
 " No knowledge is real knowledge unless you can use it with- 
 out knowing it. You do not understand the truth of anything, 
 until it has so far sunk into you that you have almost forgotten 
 
 where you got it If you desire to have your voice at 
 
 its best and to make the best use of it, you must go into a drill 
 which will become so familiar that it ceases to be a matter of 
 
 thought, arid the voice takes care of itself It was my 
 
 good fortune in early academical life to fall into the hands of your 
 estimable fellow-citizen. Professor Lovell, now of New Haven, and 
 for a period of three years I was drilled incessantly (you might not 
 suspect it, but I was) in posturing, gesture, and voice-culture. . , 
 . . It was the skill of that gentleman, that he never left a man- 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 29 
 
 ner with anybody. He simply gave his pupils the knowledge of 
 what they had in themselves." 
 
 In continuing the same subject with reference to his later 
 studies at the theological seminary, Mr. Beecher says: — 
 
 " There was a large grove lying between the Seminary and my 
 father's house, and it was the habit of my brother Charles and 
 myself and one or two others to make the night, and even the 
 day, hideous with our voices as we passed backward and forward 
 through the wood, exploding all the vowels from the bottom to 
 the very top of our voices. The drill that I underwent first and 
 last produced, not an oratorical manner, but a physical instru- 
 ment, that accommodated itself readily to every kind of thought 
 and every shape of feeling, and obeyed the inward will in the 
 outward realization of the results of rules and regulations." 
 
 Now, for the first time in his life, were the young man's 
 true powers and sensibilities laid hold on by the whole- 
 some stimulus of ambition, the real aspiration of accom- 
 plishing a purpose. True, his naval fancy soon faded 
 out in the substantial enjoyment of developing his newly- 
 awakened powers; moreover, his rescue from the dis- 
 tracting excitements of the city (for simple as they were, 
 they were wild dissipation to him) and his return to the 
 more wholesome influences of country life had a most 
 favorable effect upon him, physically and spiritually; for 
 at the end of the first year, in the midst of a general revi- 
 val of interest in religion, his whole heart turned God-ward, 
 and he united with his father's church in Boston, and de- 
 lighted his father's heart by announcing his determination 
 to take up the ministry, as a profession. He spent two 
 years more at Mount Pleasant preparing for college, and 
 entered Amherst at the end of that time. 
 
 It is interesting to see how apparently slight occurrences 
 at that time entered deep into his soul, and produced ef- 
 fects that were visible during the very plenitude of his 
 power in later days; for instance, in his sermon entitled 
 " The Background of Mystery," preached some forty-four 
 years after the event, he gives the following incident: — 
 
 " Once, when a boy, I stood on Mount Pleasant, at Amherst, 
 and saw a summer thunder-storm enter the valley of the Con- 
 
30 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 necticut from the North. Before it was all bright ; centerwise i 
 was black as midnight, and I could see the fiery streaks of light 
 ning striking down through it ; but behind the cloud — for I coulc 
 see the rear — it was bright again. In front of me was that might} 
 storm hurtling through the sky ; and before it I saw the sunlight 
 and behind it I saw the sunlight ; but to those that were undei 
 the center of it there was no brightness before or behind it 
 They saw the thunder-gust, and felt the pelting rain, and the) 
 were enveloped in darkness and heard the rush of mighty winds 
 while I, that stood afar off, could see that God was watering the 
 earth and washing the leaves, and preparing the birds for a new 
 outcome of jubilee, and giving to men refreshment and health 
 So I conceive that our human life here, with its sorrows and 
 tears, as compared with the eternity that we are going into, is nc 
 more than the breath of a summer thunder-storm ; and if God 
 sees that our experience in this world is to work out an exceed- 
 ing great reward in the world to come, there is no mystery in il 
 — to Him."* 
 
 The fact that he was the son of the foremost preacher ol 
 New England and indeed of the whole country, dis- 
 tinguished young Beecher for notice among his classmates 
 at college; but he did not rest on his father's reputation, 
 for, as is learned from the reports of his classmates, he 
 made himself felt immediately and continuously among 
 them in all matters of earnest moral and religious influence, 
 of physical and athletic sports, and of general literary and 
 rhetorical effort. 
 
 Dr. Holmes, in his eloquent paper concerning Mr, 
 Beecher's English war speeches, entitled the "Minister 
 Plenipotentiary," calls him " the same lusty, warm-hearted, 
 strong-fibered, brave-hearted, bright-souled, clear-eyed 
 creature, as he was when the college boys at Amherst ac- 
 knowledged him as the chiefest among their foot-ball 
 kickers." He was interested in matters of reform, having 
 decided anti-slavery views and being a total abstainer from 
 ardent spirits; made himself a power in the class prayer- 
 meetings; and always attracted the attention of his fellows 
 by the ability and originality of his essay-writing and his 
 fluency and eloquence in debate and extempore speaking 
 
 * Printed in Mr. Beecher's volume entitled, "Evolution and Religion." 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 31 
 
 His fount of humor flowed constantly, and irrepressibly. 
 It was a frequent sight to see a throng about him and to 
 hear from it roars of laughter. Akeady he was showing a 
 peculiar combination of native powers that furnished the 
 tools for his future work. 
 
 His inj;ei=e8t j.n phrenolog y began at this time. He says: 
 " I suppose I inherited fronTTTiy fa'thet-a tendency or in- 
 tuition to read man. The very aptitude that I recognize 
 in myself would indicate a pre-existing tendency. In my 
 Junior college year, I became, during the visit of Spurzheim, 
 enamored of phrenology, which has been for many years 
 [this was in 1872] the foundation on which I have worked, 
 although I have not made it a special study. Admit, if 
 you please, it is not exactly the true thing; and admit, if 
 you will, that there is little form or system in it; yet I have 
 worked with it much as the botanist worked with the Lin- 
 naean system of botany, the classification of which is very 
 convenient, although an artificial one. There is no natural 
 system that seems to correspond to human nature so nearly 
 as phrenology does." 
 
 Mr. Beecher's use of phrenology was rather as a con- 
 venient classification and intelligible nomenclature of the 
 faculties of the mind, than as a full acceptance of the 
 phrenological theory of the physical, cerebral organs of 
 those faculties. Former writers on mind considered the 
 mental acts of attention, perception, conception, memory, 
 etc., as faculties; while the phrenologists regarded these 
 acts as merely the modes of action of the faculties, which they 
 otherwise named and classified. Mr. Beecher thus stood 
 between the two; and, as he so often did, took for his own 
 practical purposes whatever of good he found in both, 
 without committing himself fully in theory to either. 
 
 With him was interested in phrenology the late O. S. 
 Fowler, his classmate, a man who probably did more than 
 any other to spread the practical knowledge and utilization 
 of the system among the American people. It was in con- 
 nection with phrenology, also, that young Beecher first 
 began his experience as a public lecturer. 
 
 In Mr. Beecher's Statement of Belief before the Congre- 
 
32 HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 
 
 gational Association of New York and Brooklyn, Oct. 13, 
 1882, he speaks of this matter and of other interesting 
 points in his college course: — 
 
 " I never undertook to preach by any system of philosophy 
 based on phrenology, but the whole nomenclature of mental phe- 
 nomena [in prevalent metaphysical philosophies] was so vague it 
 had no individuality in it, no power of individualizing ; it gener- 
 alized all the way through ; while phrenology brought into view 
 as distinct qualities, copibativeness, self-esteem, pride, the love of 
 approbation, the love of praise, conscience, hope, reason — that is, 
 causal and analogical reason. It gave definite names, so that one 
 could read a man ; just as you can by taking type spell out a word, 
 so by taking the different faculties you get to know the man. 
 This working apparatus of phrenology I embraced. I analyzed 
 men's actions by it. I could say to myself what sprang from this 
 or that organ : here conscience is at work, here self-esteem, and so 
 on. I do not undertake to say it was the most accurate system; 
 but I do say it gave definiteness, it gave a man an insight into his 
 fellow-man. It told him just where to strike and just what to 
 strike with, and it was altogether a more practical, personal, and 
 usable system than any of the metaphysical systems that had 
 been in vogue. 
 
 " Then, besides that, I early studied science with enthusiasm. I 
 was a pupil of Professor Hitchcock at Amherst College. I was 
 the first two years a dull scholar [in science] because I was study- 
 ing literature, history, and belles lettres, but when I came to my 
 junior and senior years I bent myself to mental philosophy and 
 scientific studies, and I have kept along the line of the front of 
 scientific investigation ever since, and these two elements have 
 underlain and been very potent to form my theological state- 
 ments. When, therefore, I am judged I ask to be judged by my 
 philosophy, and not by a very different one which my critic may 
 hold. 
 
 "The result has been unfavorable in many cases, — that is to 
 say, unfavorable to my reputation in the community. It set good 
 men a great many times apart, by misunderstanding. It has 
 caused grief to some men that were closely connected with me. 
 I know I have their confidence as to my personal piety and as to 
 my general conduct, but they fear I am straying so far from " the 
 good old sound way" that it is a matter of mourning. I do not 
 think so ; I think I am coming nearer and nearer to the good old 
 sound way. I think my views conform to Scripture a great deal 
 more than those in which I was originally educated. In regard 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. IZ 
 
 to scientific investigation, I see the day coming when one of the 
 most powerful arguments for the inspiration of the Bible will be 
 that it laid itself right along on the assumption of truths that 
 were unknown at the time they were written and by the person 
 by whom they were written. It is a remedial book. It lays 
 itself along the line of human development and human want in a 
 manner that no man can account for except by superintending 
 Providence. My scientific and philosophical views lead me to a 
 deeper and a deeper faith in the word of God." 
 
 During his last two years in college, he was very active, 
 — teaching in district schools, lecturing and zealously work- 
 ing in Christian enterprises, and taking finally the regular 
 care of Sunday services held in a school-house near Am- 
 herst. During this period, he says, "growing constantly 
 and warmly in sympathy with my father, in taking sides 
 with orthodoxy that was in battle in Boston with Unitari- 
 anism, 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." He was graduated from the college in 1834, and 
 immediately went to Cincinnati, whither his father had 
 been called, from the Park Street Church in Boston, to the 
 presidency of Lane Theological Seminary, while at the 
 same time he held the pastorate of the Second Presbyterian 
 Church. Here, of course, Mr. Beecher received the cus- 
 tomary theological training which every student in a Pres- 
 byterian theological seminary is supposed to receive, but, 
 moreover, he was drawn actively into the controversy be- 
 tween Dr. Wilson, representing the old-school doctrines of 
 what has been called "The Scotch - Irish Presbyterian 
 Calvinistic Fatalism of God's Sovereignty " on the one 
 hand, and on the other his father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, an 
 ardent partisan of the then " New School Theology " of 
 New England, pivoting on "man's free agency." 
 
 The violent opposition of Dr. Wilson to Dr. Beecher cul- 
 minated in the trial of the latter for heresy before the 
 
34 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 Presbytery. This issuing in a vindication of Dr. Beecher, 
 Dr. Wilson appealed to the Synod, where the cause was 
 tried again and with the same result. Before this came 
 about, however, the contending forces had already clashed 
 in various ways. Dr. Wilson seems to have been the 
 aggressor in every instance. 
 
 In the autobiography of Lyman Beecher* there is an 
 amusing and characteristic description written by Miss 
 Harriet E. Beecher, later known as Mrs. H. B. Stowe, of 
 the examination of her brother George before Pres- 
 bytery with the view to his ordination as a Presbyterian 
 minister. Dr. Beecher's elder sons William and Edward 
 were already in the ministry. A paragraph written by Dr. 
 Beecher in one of the circular letters whi'ch they were ac- 
 customed to send around to every branch of the family, 
 — each one adding a few lines and passing the document 
 on by mail to the nearest family station for further addi- 
 tions, — gives a glimpse at the early family life in the 
 matter of theology; which, be it remembered, is one of our 
 objective points of inquiry. Miss Beecher's lively descrip- 
 tion may be aptly prefaced by the paragraph here quoted; — 
 
 "William, why do you not write to your father.? Are you not 
 my first-born son ? Did I not carry you over bogs a-fishing, 
 a-straddle of my neck, on my shoulders, and, besides clothing and 
 feeding, whipping you often to make a man of you, as you are, 
 and would not have been without ? Don't you remember study- 
 ing theology with your father, sawing and splitting wood in that 
 wood-house in Green street, Boston, near by where you found 
 your wife ? Little do those know who have rented that tenement 
 since, how much orthodoxy was developed and imbodied there; and 
 now why should all this fruit of my labors be kept to yourself.'" 
 
 Besides William and Edward, George was now about to 
 be examined for the ministry; Henry Ward had just come 
 from Amherst College, and had entered Lane Seminary; 
 while Charles and Thomas and James were, in spite of tem- 
 porary aberrations of fancy, destined to the same high call- 
 ing. 
 
 * •' Autobiography, Correspondence, Etc., of Lyman Beecher, D. D." 
 Edited by Charles Beecher. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1865. 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 35 
 
 But to return to Miss Beecher and her Presbytery: — 
 
 " At last the moderator calls the meeting to order. They pro- 
 ceed to business. They are to examine a candidate. The candi- 
 date is Mr. George Beecher, z. New School man; but that is not 
 the worst — a Taylorite ! ! 
 
 " Do you see, in the front pew, a tall, grave-looking man, of 
 strong and rather harsh features, very pale, with a severe serious- 
 ness of face, and with great formality and precision in every turn 
 and motion? Well, if you see him, that man is Dr. Wilson. His 
 great ivory-headed cane leans on the side of the pew by him, and 
 in his hand he holds the Confession of Faith. 
 
 " The candidate sits on the pulpit stairs, so that he may face the 
 Presbytery, and the examining committee are called on : ' Dr. 
 Wilson, in Philosophy.' Here follows, ' Mr. Beecher, what is 
 matter and what is mind, and what is the difference 'twixt and 
 'tween, and what is Mechanics, and Optics, and Hydrostatics, and 
 what is Mental Philosophy, and what is Moral Philosophy, and 
 what is right and wrong, and what is truth, and what is virtue, 
 and what are the powers of the mind, and what is intellect, sus- 
 ceptibilities, and will, and conscience,' — and ever)rthing else, world 
 without endi amen ! After this the doctor's grave face gradually 
 relaxes into a smile, which seems like the melting of a snow-drift 
 as he says that he has ' pursued this branch of the examination as 
 far as might be deemed expedient.' 
 
 " ' Mr. Moderator,' says one, ' I move that the examination be 
 sustained.' ' I second it,' says another. 
 
 "The moderator then says, ' Those who sustain this examina- 
 tion say Ay.' 
 
 "Now hark — 'Ay! ay! ay!' 
 
 " ' Those of contrary mind. No.' No answer. So this is over. 
 
 " Next topic is now announced : ' Theology ! ' Now you may 
 seethe brethren bending forward, and shuffling, and looking wise. 
 Over in the pew opposite to us are the students of the Lane Sem- 
 inary, with attentive eyes. There is Theodore Weld, all awake, 
 nodding from side to side, and scarce keeping still a minute. 
 
 " ' The examiner in Theology, Brother Gallagher.' This is the 
 tall son of Anak whom I have written of aforetime — the great 
 Goliath, whose awful brows and camp-meeting hymns used so to 
 awe and edify me. He rises very leisurely, and gives a lunge for- 
 ward, precipitating his unwieldy size into a chair without much 
 regard to graceful disposition, and with a deep, deliberate voice, 
 begins. 
 
 " The beauty of it all is that Gallagher is a warm friend to 
 
36 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 George, and of similar sentiments. The appointing him to ex- 
 amine was a friendly motion of the moderator. . He con- 
 fined his examination merely to the broad and obvious truths 
 of Christianity, and then sat down. 
 
 " But now comes the fiery trial. The moderator announces, 
 ' Any of the brethren have a right to question the candidate.' 
 You must have seen before now some of them fidgeting on their 
 seats, and waiting their turn. Then such a storm of questions 
 rains in : — 
 
 " ' Mr. Beecher, do you believe in the doctrine of election } Will 
 you please to state your views on that subject.'' 'Mr. Beecher, 
 do you believe in the imputation of Adam's sin.?' 'Mr. Beecher, 
 do you believe infants are sinners as soon aS they are born ? ' ' Do 
 you believe that infants have unholy natures .■' ' ' Do you believe 
 that men are able of themselves to obey the commandments of 
 God } ' ' Mr. Beecher, do you believe men are active or passive 
 in regeneration?' 'Mr. Beecher, do you make any distinction 
 between regeneration and conversion.'' 'Mr. Beecher, do you 
 think that men are punished for the guilt of Adam's first sin.'' 
 ' Do you believe in imputed righteousness .' ' 
 
 " There was George — eyes flashing and hands going, turning 
 first to right and then to left. ' If I understand your question, 
 sir,' — 'I do not understand your terms, sir.' 'Do you mean by 
 nature thus and so.' or so?' 'In what sense do you use the word 
 imputation?' 'I don't exactly understand you, sir.' 'Yes, sir' (to 
 right). 'No, sir' (to left). 'I should think so, sir' (in front). 
 
 " So far I wrote when I heard George, and father, and Edward 
 coming in from meeting; for Edward is with us — poked in like 
 1 ghost upon us one day just after George's examination. The 
 first that father knew of the matter was seeing him going by the 
 window, and exclaiming, ' There 's a man looks like Edward ! ' and 
 the next minute we were all electrified by seeing him standing 
 among us. 
 
 " To-night Edward and Professor Sturtevant, father and George, 
 fiave been holding a long chat. At last father and Edward went 
 down cellar to saw wood. Don't that seem natural ? I heard the 
 ivord 'foreordination' through the parlor floor, so I knew what 
 they were talking about.* I have come up and left them. . . . 
 
 " Now to finish the account of Presbyterj^ The examination 
 lasted nearly two hours and a half, after which the farther con- 
 
 *This little touch reveals the theologic atmosphere in which the whole 
 Beecher family was reared as perfectly as volumes of description could do. 
 -Ed. 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 37 
 
 sideration of that subject was postponed till examination had^ 
 taken place in other branches. The next day the Presbytery were 
 called upon to see if they had any remarks to make upon the 
 examination thus far. Then such a war of words ! 
 
 "The way of proceeding is to call over the names of the whole 
 Presbytery in order, and each one, when his name is called, has 
 the liberty of rising and speaking as long as he will. The whole 
 day was taken up in this way. I went only in the afternoon, and 
 what I heard was (apart from moral considerations) sufficiently 
 diverting. 
 
 "There are men — one or two, I mean,— whose minds have 
 been brought up in a catechetical treadmill — who will never say 
 ' Confession of Faith ' without taking off their hats, and who 
 have altogether the appearance of thinking that the Bible is the 
 next best book to the Catechism. These men are, of course, mor- 
 tally afraid of heresy — or ' hear say,' as an old woman very perti- 
 nently pronounced it — and their remarks on this subject were 
 truly lucid. . . . 
 
 " The discussion, as I have said, lasted all day. In the evening 
 we came, and they went at it again. There was quite an audi- 
 ence in the house, as preaching had been expected. All the 
 Presbytery had finished their remarks except father and Dr. Wil- 
 son, who, as the oldest, came last on the list. Father, as first 
 called on, rose, and went through a regular statement of what 
 he conceived to be the views expressed by the candidate, and a 
 regular argument to show that they were in agreement with the 
 Confession of Faith. He spoke well, clearly and persuasively, and 
 was occasionally a little humorous. He began by saying that it 
 was his belief that, however they might differ in points of opin- 
 ion, they were all honest, well-intentioned men. ' We are honest ! ' 
 (bringing down his fist). But then he said that there were some 
 dangers in this meeting together in Presb5rtery; that ministers 
 were so much accustomed to command the whole ship at home 
 that they did not always feel exactly tractable in a Presbytery ; 
 'and I hope,' said he, 'that, for the future, our elders will take 
 better care of us ' (here a general smile went round among the 
 elders). 
 
 "Toward the close of the speech he said that, if the case 
 should be carried up to the Synod, he should be prepared to 
 prove even more fully many points ; 'and in that case,' said he, 
 bringing down his forefinger, ' I shall think myself happy. King 
 Agrippa, to speak more fully of this matter.' He also insinuated 
 that if Presbyteries, and Synods, and all the legislative bodies 
 
38 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 should turn out and reject all who held those sentiments, yet 
 they could not stop their progress. ' No,' said he, 'we shall still 
 live ; we shall stand on God's earth, and breathe his air, and 
 preach his Gospel as we believe it.' 
 
 " When father sat down Dr. Wilson rose up, and made a speech 
 of about half an hour, in which he stated that he believed that 
 the candidate was not a Christian, and knew nothing experi- 
 mentally about Christianity, and that he firmly believed that he 
 and all those who held the same sentiments with him, ' would 
 never see the gates of eternal bliss.' 
 
 "This was abundantly courteous for Dr. Wilson, Since he 
 merely shut us out of heaven this time, without pronouncing 
 sentence any more definitely. Many people say that it is 
 altogether the mildest and most temperate speech they ever 
 heard him make. After this speech the question was taken, 
 though with much difficulty and opposition ; and on calling the 
 roll, the examination was sustained by a majority of twenty- 
 three. About twelve o'clock at night we found ourselves once 
 more at home and in a state of high excitement, and sat up about 
 half an hour longer to fight over the battle to Catharine, who 
 had not been able to go out." 
 
 Of course, years of such surroundings as this, followed, 
 as were the events just related, by increasing bitterness on 
 the side of the attacking party (who, to the credit of the 
 Presbyteries concerned, seem to have got the worst of every 
 judicial combat) ; the studies of the course itself; the en- 
 suing trials of his father for heresy, together with the 
 lively correspondence among friends and foes, and the 
 family discussions of all these controverted points and 
 persons, kept young Beecher's mind alert in study of all 
 the close theological distinctions, and familiarized him 
 with the whole ground as no mere seminary curriculum 
 could have done. 
 
 The result of this theological warfare, however, was 
 very depressing to Henry Ward, who found less and less 
 promise of fruitfulness in such a long continued course of 
 dialectics, in which each combatant strongly held to his 
 
 /<5wn views, and no result was ever reached. Indeed, he 
 became convinced at that early day that men are most 
 positive in theology about things of which they know the 
 
 Meast; they are most dogmatical on what they call "funda- 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 39 
 
 mentals " for which they find least solid foundations in 
 the Holy Scriptures or in nature. He felt, already, after 
 a childhood and youth, and a young manhood, spent in 
 the atmosphere of disputatious theology, that (as he says 
 in his sermon entitled " The Golden Net ") " the question 
 is not to be with the plow and the harrow, but with the 
 harvest. The farmer that raises the best wheat in the best 
 quantity, and in the best manner, and constantly, is the 
 best farmer, no matter what his tools are." 
 
 In one of the family circular letters already alluded to, 
 written shortly after young Beecher had got at his pastoral 
 work, occurs the following passage addressed by him to this 
 same brother George, who seems to have tended toward 
 the belief in the possibility of Christian "perfection:" — 
 
 "As to perfectionism, I am not greatly troubled with the 
 fact of it in myself, or the doctrine of it in you ; for I feel sure 
 that if you give yourself time and prayer, you will settle down 
 right, whatever the right may be ; and I rejoice, on this account, 
 that your judgment has led you to forbear publishing, because, 
 after we hsN^ published, if we do not hit exactly right, there is a 
 vehement ten^ptation not to advance but rather to nurse and 
 defend our published views. The treatises which have had influ- 
 ence in this world from generation to generation are those which 
 have been matured, re-thought, re-cast, delayed. Apples that 
 ripen early are apt to be worm-eaten, and decay early at any rate ; 
 late fruit keeps best." 
 
 His early experiences however, while they taught him 
 how easily men may be mistaken in their philosophizings 
 even while most confident that they are correct, thus made 
 him feel free all his life long to let his humor play pleas- 
 antly about the heads of those who dogmatize; and yet, 
 in the necessity of some systematic mode of regarding the 
 truths of /eligion he was a firm believer, and not only can 
 there be found in his works no passages inconsistent with 
 this view but those are numerous which testify to his high 
 estimate of reason in the philosophy of spiritual matters. 
 
 In his "Yale Lectures" he says: — 
 
 " It is very desirable, I think, that every preacher should have 
 not merely gone through a system, but that he should have 
 studied comparative theology. He ought to study that system 
 
^o HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 yci which he expects to base his ministry ; and it is also desirable 
 ;hat he should take cross-views of differing systems of theology — ■ 
 'or a variety of reasons, You may think that you are going to 
 preach some particular system, — but most t)f you will not, even 
 :f you try. You may take your teachers' views of theology and 
 preach them for a while, but they will not suit you long. Every 
 nan who is fit to preach will, before many years, begin to have 
 m outline of his own theology very distinctly marked out. But 
 t is always necessary to know what other men have thought, to 
 practice close thinking, to be drilled in sharp and nice discrim- 
 nation, and to have a mind that is not slatternly and loose, but 
 
 ivhich knows how to work philosophically You must 
 
 icquire the habit of thinking, of looking at truth, not in isolated 
 ind fragmentary forms, but in all its relations ; and of using it 
 constantly as an instrument for producing good. You see I do 
 believe in the science of theology, though I may not give my 
 faith to any particular school of it in all points. But no school 
 :an dispense with a habit of thinking according to the laws of 
 :ause and effect. 
 
 " Theology is osteology, and a skeleton is a poor thing to live 
 ivith. But that which makes a man handsome is not being with- 
 3ut bones. Some people say, because I occasionally hit theology 
 1 slap, that I do not believe in it. Indeed, I do believe in it ; 
 but I believe in something else besides". Theology ought to be 
 inside; it is the frame on which you build everything.' I believe 
 in the succulency and the elasticity of the nerve, and the bloom 
 and beauty of the skin that overlies it all ; but what would all 
 these things be if there were not any bones thei;e to lay them 
 upon, and by which they could stand up and be operated ? Men 
 would all be gelatinous ; no better than so many jelly-fish. So 
 theology has its own sphere and function." 
 
 Thus, while he had from the first a clear estimate of the 
 importance of theologic training,— of which he was getting 
 a larger share than falls to the lot of the average student, 
 — yet his soul was impatient for action. This youthful 
 David felt oppressed and encumbered by the Saul's armor 
 and weapons which he had been testing long enough 
 to feel that his preparation for the fight was to come in 
 another way. 
 
 In a letter written to Dr. John H. Raymond,* about a 
 
 *"Li£e and Letters of John H. Raymond, First President of Vassar 
 College." New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, i88i. 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 41 
 
 year after his going East (1848), Mr. Beecher mentions a 
 theological dispute then raging over Dr. Bushnell's teach- 
 ings:— 
 
 " I see no benefit in a controversy. It will be a fierce technical 
 dispute about propositions, at the expense in the churches of 
 vital godliness. . . . Others may blow the bellows and turn 
 the doctrines in the fire and lay them on the anvil of controversy, 
 and beat them with all sorts of hammers into all sorts of shapes ; 
 but I shall busy myself With using the sword of the Lord, not in 
 forging it." 
 
 This was the lesson which he learned very early. He 
 well knew the processes by which the doctrines were 
 fused and forged and changed from age to age, but he 
 felt in himself the ability for a higher craft than the 
 smith's;- and how effectively he wielded his powers for 
 fifty years the world knows. 
 
 But there was another part of his course in the sem- 
 inary which was of incalculable value. He says: — 
 
 " I had the good fortune to be under Professor Stowe in 'my 
 theological training. Those who have gone through a course 
 with him need not be told how much knowledge he has, nor his 
 keen and crystalline way of putting that knowledge. The ad- 
 vantages which I derived from his teaching, his way of taking 
 hold of Scripture, the knowledge I got of the Bible as a whole, 
 are inestimable to me. In looking over my old note-books, 
 which I filled independently of my course there, but which were 
 partly in consequence of it and partly from teaching in the Bible 
 class, I found I had gone then very nearly through the New 
 Testament with close and careful study, and had formed an inti- 
 mate acquaintance with it, before I began to preach regularly. 
 In the early years of my ministry, I engaged in a great amount of 
 exegetical study and interpretation of the word of God, having 
 one service a week which was mainly devoted to that work. The 
 preliminary acquisition of the power to do that will abbreviate 
 your after-work more than you can tell. Do not believe that 
 your enthusiasm will be a light always burning. You must have 
 oil in your lamps. Study and patient labor are indispensable 
 even to genius.'' 
 
 This study of the Bible, under Professor Stowe and by 
 himself, and especially during his last term at the Semin- 
 ary while he was in charge of the Bible class, was really 
 
i2 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 lis salvation from the depression and condition of doubt 
 into which he had been thrown by the theological combats 
 just alluded to. For one of his brothers, surcharged with 
 doubts, had thrown up the ministry (although he after- 
 ward returned to it again), and Henry Ward himself during 
 the hot rage of pro-slavery rioting in Cincinnati and the 
 ^reat anti-slavery excitement in the seminary itself, had 
 for some months been actively engaged in editing the Cin- 
 dnnati Journal, by means of which his ideas and feelings 
 were drawn to the possibility of his escaping the ministe- 
 rial life and adopting journalism as his profession. That he 
 would have been one of the country's great editors, no one 
 can doubt; yet how much would have been lost to journal- 
 ism itself, as well as to the cause of God and the up-build- 
 ing of man in the multitudinous avenues through which 
 this man's influence has been felt, had he not been drawn 
 as he was, by the inspiration imparted to him in the study 
 of the Scriptures, to the founding of his whole professional 
 life upon the broad basis of God's work in the world ! 
 
 From this close and loving study he received two lumi- 
 nous thoughts. He speaks of the time, 
 
 " When it pleased God to reveal to my wandering soul the idea 
 that it was His nature to love a man m his sins for the sake of 
 helping him out of them ; that he did not do it out of compliment 
 to Christ, or to a ' law ' or a ' plan of salvation,' but from the full- 
 ness of His great heart. . . . Time went on, and next came 
 the disclosure of a Christ ever present with m.e — a Christ that 
 never was far from me, but was always near me, as a companion 
 and friend, to uphold and sustain me. This was the last and the 
 best revelation of God's Spirit to my soul." 
 
 Of course it is not to be supposed that the inspiration of 
 these great ideas. had now been for the first time presented 
 to young Beecher's mind, but simply this: his whole train- 
 ing and education thus far had been along the line of the 
 Calvinistic theology, involving chiefly the idea of God's 
 sovereignty and power. Aided by the controversies of the 
 time, then beginning to break away from under the mighty 
 shadow of that truth, controversies aiming to establish the 
 theory of man's free agency and consequent responsibility, 
 
HEREDITY, TRAINING, AND EDUCATION. 43 
 
 nd giving to human individuality a dignity which the older 
 heology did not allow to it, — he was yet hampered and 
 bstructed by the sense of argumentation; his heart, that 
 remendous engine of moral and spiritual power, was not 
 atisfied. But, from the time when his soul was lifted up 
 ly these two great truths — God's nature as manifested by 
 esus the Christ to love man in his sins for the sake of help- 
 ng him out of them, and the sustaining Christ ever present 
 'lith individual men ("a real presence" of perennial spiritual 
 afluence), — he sprang to his work with an ardor that was 
 nquenched to the end of his life. 
 
 God's love because of his fatherhood; man's worth and 
 nutual brotherhood because of his sonship to God: these 
 /ere the two halves of the one great theme which from 
 hat time to the day of his final silence, underlay his life, 
 lis words, his works. 
 
 Indeed his own playful way of putting this is as apt as 
 ny could be: "I was like the man in the story, to whom 
 he fairy gave a purse with a single piece of money in it, 
 i^hich he found always came again as soon as he had 
 pent it. I thought I had found at least one thing to 
 ireach; I found it included everything." 
 
 With the close of his theological studies in 1837, young 
 Seecher married Miss Eunice White Bullard, a sister of 
 ine of his classmates and a daughter of Dr. Bullard of 
 Vorcester, Mass. Their betrothal had lasted faithfully 
 or seven years, and their faithful companionship in mar- 
 ied life lasted^ for fifty years, his death in 1887 rounding 
 he half century. 
 
 Here, then, concludes the first period of Henry Ward 
 Jeecher's life. We have tried to sketch — or rather to have 
 lim sketch — the inherited traits, the early influences, that 
 ombined to give him his outfit. He was not one whose 
 ;ducation was finished when he left the theological sem- 
 nary. To the day of his death he learned, he grew, he 
 ncreased the talent committed to his charge; but on leav- 
 ng the seminary he was armed and equipped, and in- 
 pired with the best thought of his life. 
 
^4 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 III. 
 
 TEN YEARS OF MISSIONARY WORK. 
 
 It is neither possible nor desirable in this place to give 
 1 biography of Mr. Beecher. The object sought is sim- 
 ply to gather some memoirs going to show the main 
 sources of his power as an instructor of public thought 
 and a stimulator of public feeling, the principles from 
 which he drew his own inspiration, and the consistency 
 with which he maintained them under whatever variations 
 of the influences about him, — whether social, religious, 
 ecclesiastical, or political. 
 
 He preached for a brief time in the Presbyterian Church 
 in Covington, Kentucky, but soon received a call from 
 Lawrenceburg, Indiana, a small town about twenty miles 
 west of Cincinnati, where for two years he labored in his 
 little low wooden building, which would seat one hundred 
 and fifty people, the church membership consisting of 
 twenty members, — as he puts it, " nineteen of them were 
 women, and the other was nothing," — he and his young 
 wife living in two rooms over a provision store, with a 
 salary of two hundred and fifty dollars guaranteed by the 
 Home Missionary Society, and a possible one hundred and 
 fifty more from the parish, paid if at all in provisions. 
 Less than $i.io a day, if all was paid ! When we read 
 such figures as these and think of the self-denying labors 
 and privations of those who labor for God and man in our 
 frontier settlements, it seems clear that when, many years 
 afterwards, Mr. Beecher was trying to arouse the manliness 
 cjf the working-men to meet the rigors of hard times, and 
 said that if all they could get was a dollar a day they 
 
TEN YEARS OF MISSIONARY WORK. 45 
 
 should make that suffice, he well knew what he was talk- 
 ing about. 
 
 Mr. Beecher's own pictures of these days of destitution 
 are very graphic, but we cannot stop to consider them in 
 detail; and yet these two years were among the most val- 
 uable of his training-time, bringing him face-to-face and 
 hand-to-hand with the ills and miseries of actual privation 
 and poverty as well as the hard pastoral work of a Home 
 Missionary in a malarial district among a scattered people. 
 He was blessed with health, vigor, perseverance, and 
 already an intuitive way of getting at people's hearts. 
 
 He says: — 
 
 " There lived over on the other side of the street in Lawrence- 
 burg, where first I had my settlement, a very profane man, who 
 was counted ugly. I understood that he had said some very 
 bitter things of me. I went right over to his store, and sat down 
 on the counter to talk with him. I happened in often, — day in 
 and day out. My errand was to make him like me. I did make 
 him like me, — and all the children too ; and when I left, two or 
 three years later, it was his house that was opened to me and all 
 my family for the week after I gave up my room. And to the 
 day of his death I do not believe the old man could mention my 
 name without crying." 
 
 Thus it was that he learned early in his career the 
 secret of winning the sympathies of the men whom he de- 
 sired to influence. He relates in one place his visit to the 
 manufacture of papier mache in Birmingham, England. He 
 was noticing the various processes from room to room, 
 until, coming to where they give the final polish, he was 
 told that they had tried everything in the world for pol- 
 ishing and at last had been convinced that there was no 
 leather or other substance that had such power to polish 
 to the very finest smoothness, as the living leather in its 
 vital state, — the human hand. " It is very much so," says 
 he, " with people. You can teach them from the pulpit 
 in certain large ways, but there are some things you can- 
 not do except by putting your very hand upon them." 
 
 During these two years young Beecher made his mark 
 not only in the little community where he was working 
 
46 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 but also in Cincinnati, where he occasionally preached in 
 his father's pulpit, at the Second Presbyterian Church. 
 In 1839 he was called to Indianapolis, then a place of 
 about four thousand inhabitants, the capital of the State. 
 The " new school " and " old school " theological discuS' 
 sions were still disturbing the churches (as when indeed 
 are they not ! ) and he was called to a new congregation 
 which had swarmed off from their more conservative 
 brethren. He had now a larger salary ($600 — say $1.65 
 per diem) but also larger expenses, and was compelled 
 still, although not suffering from positive poverty, to exer- 
 cise rigid economy and live in great simplicity. 
 
 As to preaching, he had, as we have seen, had consider- 
 able experience. He had practiced public speaking from 
 the time of his Sophomore year at college, — making tem- 
 perance speeches, holding conference meetings, and in 
 various ways learning to overcome his natural diffidence 
 and acquiring power to face people and to think on 
 his feet. In the little Lawrenceburg church he had 
 preached the best sermons that he knew how to get up, 
 but was constantly discouraged with his own efforts. He 
 says: "I remember distinctly that every Sunday night I 
 had a headache. I went to bed every Sunday night with 
 a vow registered that I would buy a farm and quit the 
 ministry." 
 
 But while thus slowly feeling his way toward the power 
 of setting forth truth in a way to lay hold on the minds of 
 men, he was diligently filling up his own mind. He says : — 
 
 " I read Robert South, through and through ; I saturated my- 
 self with South. I formed much of my style and my handling of 
 texts on his methods. I obtained a vast amount of instruction 
 ind assistance from others of those old sermonizers, who were as 
 familiar to me as my own name. I read Barrow, Howe, Sherlock, 
 Butler, and Edwards particularly. I preached a great many ser- 
 mons while reading these old men, and upon their discourses I 
 Dften founded the framework of my own. After I had preached 
 them I said to myself, ' That will never do ; I wouldn't preach that 
 igain for the world ; ' but I was learning, and nobody ever tripped 
 tne up." 
 
TEN YEARS OF MISSIONARY WORK. 47 
 
 In fact he learned slowly, in spite of his father's power 
 as a preacher and an effective mover of men, and of his 
 own facility and popularity as a speaker. He himself tells 
 us, " For the first three years of my ministry I did not make 
 a single sinner wink." He was gaining in reputation, but 
 that was not what he was aiming at; and it was not until 
 the beginning of a period of intense religious excitement, 
 which indeed grew largely out of his own efforts, that at 
 last he seems to have come to something of the power 
 which so largely abode with him from that time forward. 
 More and more constantly did he study the life and the 
 teachings of Hirii who spoke as never man spake, earnestly 
 seeking the secret by means of which it was that the com- 
 mon people heard Him gladly. He also gave zealous study 
 to the doings and sayings of those first Christian mission- 
 aries, the apostles, and both while at Lawrenceburg and in 
 the first portion of his Indianapolis pastorate, he did much 
 to furnish himself with the best of material and the best of 
 models for his work. He says:' — 
 
 " I owe more to the Book of Acts and the writings of the 
 Apostle Paul than to all other books put together. I was sent 
 into the wilderness of Indiana to preach among the poor and 
 ignorant, and I lived in my saddle. My library was in my saddle- 
 bags ; I went from camp-meeting to camp-meeting, and from log 
 hut to log hut. I took my New Testament, and from it I got 
 that which has been the very secret of any success that I have 
 had in the Christian ministry." 
 
 And again: — 
 
 "When I had lived at Indianapolis the first year, I said, 'There 
 was a reason why when the apostles preached they succeeded, 
 and I will find it out if it is to be found out.' I took every single 
 instance in the record where I could find one of their sermons, 
 and analyzed it, and asked myself, 'What were their circum- 
 stances.? Who were the people.? What did he do?' And I 
 studied the sermons until I got this idea : that the apostles were 
 accustomed first to feel for a ground on which the people and they 
 stood together ; a common ground where they could meet. Then 
 they stored up a large number of the particulars of knowledge 
 that belonged to everybody ; and when they had got that knowl- 
 edge which everybody would admit placed in a proper form be- 
 
48 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 fore the minds of the people, then they brought it to bear upon 
 them with all their excited heart and feeling. That was the first 
 definite idea of taking aim thax. I had in my mind. 'Now,' said 
 I, ' I will make a sermon so.' I remember it just as well as if it 
 were yesterday. First, I sketched out the things we all know, 
 . . . and in that way I went on with my ' you all knows,' until 
 I had about forty of them. When I had got through that, I 
 turned round and brought it to bear upon them with all my 
 might ; and there were seventeen men awakened under that ser- 
 mon. I never felt so triumphant in my life. I cried all the way 
 home. I said to myself, ' Now I know, how to preach.' I could 
 not make another sermon for a month that was good for any- 
 thing. I had used all my powder and shot on that one. But, for 
 the first time in my life, I had got the idea of taking aim. I 
 soon added to it the idea of analyzing the people I was preaching 
 to, and so taking aim for specialties. Of course that came grad- 
 ually and later, with growing knowledge and experience." 
 
 And again: — 
 
 " It is easier to study law and become a successful practitioner, 
 it is easier to study medicine and become a successful practitioner, 
 than it is to study the human soul all through — to know its living 
 forms, and to know the way of talking to it and coming, into sym- 
 pathy with it." 
 
 We have seen (p. 24) how he had learned the lesson of 
 thoroughness, in the preparation for his " Lectures to 
 Young Men." At the time of his Indianapolis pastorate, 
 the assembling in that city of the State Legislature brought 
 together a great m^ny people of all kinds, and as the chief 
 city of the State it was naturally alive not only with good 
 influences, but also with bad, and at one time vice seemed 
 to fairly riot there. Gambling and drinking and all forms 
 of evil flourished rankly. Seeing here an opportunity, 
 young Beecher prepared himself by a careful study of 
 facts, and then delivered that series of lectures which when 
 gathered and published (as most of his early books were, 
 for the pecuniary benefit of other people), formed his first 
 book. The venerable Dr. Leonard Bacon, contemporary 
 and friend of the older Beecher, wrote: — 
 
 " I remember admiring its force of thought and inspiration, its 
 wealth of illustration, its insight into human nature under the 
 various phases of individual character, its boldness of assault and 
 
TEN YEARS OF MISSIONARY WORK. 49 
 
 denunciation, its earnestness in warning young men against moral 
 dangers, and the electric force of its incitements to manly aspira- 
 tions and manly living. In every lecture I seemed to see sparks 
 as from the red-hot iron on the old anvil, and to hear the old 
 Boanerges thundering with a youthful voice." 
 
 These lectures produced an intense excitement in the 
 community. Many men of high social and political stand- 
 ing felt themselves aimed at, and were wrathful; but the 
 city thronged to hear them, consciences were aroused, per- 
 ceptions enlightened, hearts touched, arid the result was a 
 revival of religion that shook the community. This plain 
 presentation of simple truth with a bold hand, set forth in 
 dramatic forms, followed up by moral instruction and spirit- 
 ual incitement, really struck the key-note of the man's life 
 and labor. 
 
 But it was not only boldness that he learned, but deftness 
 also was coming to his modes of management. 
 
 When he was at Indianapolis, he says: — 
 
 " Nobody was allowed to say a word on the subject of slavery. 
 They were all red-hot out there then ; and one of my elders said, 
 ' If an Abolitionist comes here I will head a mob to put him down.' 
 I was a young preacher. I had some pluck ; I felt, and it grew in 
 me, that that was a subject that ought to be preached upon. . . 
 . . . The question was, how shall I do it ? I recollect one of 
 the earliest efforts I made in that direction was in a sermon on 
 some general topic. It was necessary to illustrate a point, and I 
 did it by picturing a father ransoming his son from captivity 
 among the Algerines, and glorying in his love of liberty and his 
 fight against bondage. They all thought I was going to apply it 
 to slavery ; but I did not, I applied it to my subject and it passed 
 off : and they all drew a long breath. It was not long before I 
 had another illustration from that quarter, and so, before I had 
 been there a year, I had gone all over the sore spots of slavery, in 
 illustrating the subject of Christian experience and doctrine. It 
 broke the ice." 
 
 The above passage occurs in his instructions to young 
 preachers on the subject of Illustrations, and it seems worth 
 while to include another paragraph pursuing the same 
 topic: — 
 
 " You may go down to the brook under the willows and angle 
 for the trout that everybody has been trying to catch, but in vain. 
 
5° HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 
 
 iTou go splashing and tearing along, throwing in your line, pole 
 ind all. Do you think you can catch them that way? No, in- 
 jeed ; you must begin afar off and quietly, if need be drawing 
 jfourself along on the grass and perhaps even on your belly, until 
 jrou come where through the quivering leaves you see the flash 
 Df the sun; and then slowly and gently you throw your line so 
 :hat the fly on its end falls as light as a gossamer upon the placid 
 surface of the brook. The trout will think ' That is not a bait 
 ;hrown to catch mej there is nobody there,' and rises to the fly, 
 ;akes it, — and you take him." 
 
 He earnestly strove both in spirit of life and in method 
 Df labor to follow Jesus, that he might be made a fisher of 
 men. 
 
 Perhaps one of the most fruitful fields of the infinite 
 variety of illustrations used by Mr. Beecher throughout 
 tiis life was his love for nature, his profound and extensive 
 knowledge of its processes and productions, his apprecia- 
 tion of its myriad forms and sounds of beauty, the senti- 
 ments which it is capable of arousing in the human soul, 
 and the multiform similitudes which it offers to the condi- 
 tions and development of human life. His facile control 
 of this vast field of course did not come by accident. He 
 always loved and sympathized with the life of the natural 
 world from his earliest childhood, and much of his boy- 
 hood and youth was spent in the meadows and along the 
 brooks and among the woods. The cultivation of flowers 
 and shrubs and of all manner of vegetables had been his 
 delight in youth and his necessity when life-work began. 
 During his two years at Mount Pleasant Academy, while 
 preparing for college, he had found a sympathetic instructor 
 m an old gai'dener, who taught him much, and he had never 
 been without a vital and practical interest in those mat- 
 ters. In his preface to the first edition of " Pleasant Talk 
 about Fruits, Flowers, and Farming," a collection of his 
 articles from the Weste?-n Farmer and Gardener., which 
 he edited while he was in Indianapolis (by way of resting 
 from his pulpit labors), he says: — 
 
 " It may be of some service to the young as showing how valu- 
 able the fragments of time may become, if mention is made of 
 the way in which we became prepared to edit this journal. The 
 
TEN YEARS OF MISSIONARY WORK. 51 
 
 continued taxation of daily preaching, extending througli months, 
 and once through eighteen consecutive months without the ex- 
 ception of a single day, began to wear upon our nerves, and 
 made it necessary for usto 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 encyclopedias 
 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. 
 . . . . In this way, through several years, we gradually accu- 
 mulated materials and became familiar with facts and principles, 
 which paved the way for our editorial labors. ' Lindley's Horti- 
 culture ' and ' Gray's Structural Botany ' came in as constant com- 
 panions. And when, at length, through a friend's liberality we 
 became the recipients of the London Gardener's Chronicle, edited 
 by Professor Lindley, our treasures were inestimable. Many 
 hundred times have we lain awake for hours, unable to throw off 
 the excitement of preaching, beguiling the time with imaginary 
 visits to the Chiswick Garden, and to the more than Oriental 
 magnificence of the Duke of Devonshire's grounds at Chatsworth. 
 We have had long discussions, in that little bedroom at Indianap- 
 olis, with Van Mons about pears, with Vibert about roses, with 
 Thompson and Knight 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 rela- 
 tions to the material world, that we speak with entire moderation 
 when we say thajt all the estates of the richest duke in England 
 could not have given us half the pleasure which we derived from 
 pastures, waysides, and unoccupied prairies." 
 
 There was probably no one feature of Mr. Beecher's 
 writing or speaking upon any topic whatsoever, so notice- 
 able as his accurate and apparently intuitive knowledge of 
 the natural world. But his knowledge was worked for; 
 the wonder was his power of assimilation. " Natural 
 genius," he says, " is but the soil, which, let alone runs to 
 weeds. If it is to bear fruit and harvest worth the reap- 
 ing, it must be plowed and tilled with incessant care." 
 And again: "Though a man be born to genius, a natural 
 
52 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 reader and a natural reasoner, these endowments give him 
 but the outlines of himself, and filling up means incessant, 
 painstaking study and work. ... It may be impas- 
 sioned, facile, and fruitful, remunerating him as it goes on; 
 nevertheless, there must be incessant work. Work may be 
 light, unburdensome, as full of song as the merry brook 
 that turns the miller's wheel; but no wheel is ever turned 
 without the rush and weight of the stream upon it." 
 
 And yet again: " No man can preach well except out of 
 an abundance of well-wrought material. Some sermons 
 seem to start up suddenly, soul and body; but no, they are 
 the product of years of experience. . . . It is only the 
 form, like the occasion, that is extemporaneous. No man 
 preaches except out of the stores that have been gathered 
 in him." 
 
 And now, by way of rounding up the period of his West- 
 ern ministry, — the two years at Lawrenceburg and the 
 eight at Indianapolis, — let us make one more quotation 
 illustrative of his power of adapting truth to circumstances; 
 showing his growth in the art of maintaining principles 
 which should be consistent in themselves, while presenting 
 different fronts to different winds: — 
 
 " When my ministry was in the West, what did I find } A loose 
 and heterogeneous mass of men who had come from everywhere, 
 — the detritus from the stream of immigration. As at the delta 
 of the Mississippi is gathered refuse which floats down from the 
 region above, so in the West were gathered human beings from 
 almost every nation on the globe ; and there the principle of in- 
 dividualism was the predominant one. I insisted upon the sanc- 
 tity of the Sabbath day ; I insisted upon the absolute necessity of 
 churches and church forms ; and I insisted upon the indispensa- 
 bleness of authority and of obedience to that authority. I 
 preached every Sunday against individualism, and in favor of 
 association. By and by I was transferred to the East ; and there 
 I found society hard-ribbed, vigorous. Men were lopped off on 
 every side to make them fit into crowded populations. Society 
 was tyrannical. And ever since I came East I have fought society, 
 and tried to get individual men to be free, independent, and large. 
 I was right both times. I did not care for abstract theories. My 
 object was to get men. . . . Now if I had to study the propor- 
 
TEN YEARS OF MISSIONARY WORK. 53 
 
 tions of a philosophy, I should probably study in such a way that 
 I would save my philosophy but lose ray men. . . . Who cries 
 for symmetry in medicine? Symmetry in health is what we want." 
 
 Mr. Beecher's Western life was full of distresses and dis- 
 comforts, but glowing with conscious advancement in 
 inner life and in outward success in his calling. He- said 
 during a visit to Indianapolis in 1876: "I went to Indian- 
 apolis in the fall of 1839 with a little sick babe in my arms 
 which showed the first symptons of recovery after eating 
 blackberries which I gathered by the way. The city had 
 then a population of four thousand [now, in 1887, one 
 hundred and fifty thousand]. 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 have bumped 
 against them in a buggy too often not to be well 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 Gar- 
 dener; here I had my first taste of chills and fever; here 
 for the first time, I waded to church ankle-deep in mud 
 and preached with pantaloons tucked into my boot-tops. 
 . . . It is now a mighty city, full of foundries, manu- 
 factories, wholesale stores, and with a magnificent court- 
 house, beautiful dwellings, noble churches, wide and fine 
 streets, and railroads more than I could mention, radiating 
 to every point of the compass." He alludes in another 
 passage to " 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 the mud, half drowned in crossing rivers, 
 long, lonely forest rides, camp meetings, preachings in 
 camps, sleepings in the open air." 
 
 If the physical aspects of these days were dark to the 
 sturdy, vigorous, elastic preacher, to his young wife, — 
 nurtured in the serenity of a New England town, accus- 
 tomed to the conveniences and pleasant industries of a 
 
54 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 New England home, — this being plunged into the rude- 
 nesses of an almost frontier life and the drain both phys- 
 ical and mental of a rapidly increasing family of little 
 children, was darkness almost unrelieved. Her health 
 failed, her spirits were depressed, and her condition was a 
 source of the keenest anxiety to the loving husband. The 
 spring of 1847, therefore, found young Beecher in a very 
 uncertain state of mind. Vital and springy in bodily con- 
 dition; mentally active, intense, out-reaching, greedily 
 acquiring and prodigally pouring forth the treasures acces- 
 sible to him; encouraged, stimulated, conscious of grow- 
 ing power, and having a heart aflame with zeal for 
 Christ and love for man, — he was, on the other hand, 
 weighted with wearing anxiety for his dear wife, worrying 
 about his children and home, and — even in intellectual 
 matters — while craving books and art and music and the 
 means of a wider and finer culture, he was cabined, cribbed, 
 confined, by his own poverty and the scanty resources of 
 the community in which he lived. So that all causes com- 
 bined to make it a glad thing for him to receive, as he did 
 at that time, an invitation to go East with his wife to at- 
 tend what was then known as " Anniversary Week,'' in 
 New York City, and to deliver one of the addresses before 
 the Home Missionary Society. 
 
 As it seemed then, it was in itself the great event of his 
 life; as we see it now, it was in itself a very small affair, 
 except as being the initiative step of his real career. 
 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH: PERSONAL TRAITS. ^S 
 
 IV. 
 PLYMOUTH CHURCH: PERSONAL TRAITS. 
 
 Congregationalism, as a denomination, had down to 
 1840 made but small progress outside of New England. A 
 movement for its extension began very actively about 
 that time. One of the very earliest efforts of that activity 
 was the founding of the Church of the Pilgrims in the city 
 of Brooklyn in 1844. Shortly after its successful inaugura- 
 tion, some of its members determined to start another Con- 
 gregational church and proceeded actively to accomplish 
 that, by purchasing the building of the Old First Presby- 
 terian Church, then just vacated for a new one. The first 
 services were held on Sunday, May 16, 1847. 
 
 Mr. Beecher, who had met with a welcome at the Anni- 
 versary meetings in New York largely on account of his 
 father and elder brothers, had made a marked impression 
 there by his own addresses. Mr. William P. Cutter, of 
 New York, who had known and admired him in the West, 
 had already mentioned him to the gentlemen who had 
 initiated the new church project; and the young preacher 
 was invited to be present at the opening services of the 
 church and preach the first sermons, which he did with 
 marked acceptability, morning and evening. The church 
 was organized on Sunday, June 13, with twenty-one mem- 
 bers. The wife of one of the promoters had suggested 
 "Plymouth Brethren" as a name, and "Plymouth Church" 
 was the title adopted. Young -Beecher, who had gone on 
 to Boston after his first preaching, returned a few weeks 
 later and preached again, for two successive Sundays; 
 the consequence being that on June 14, 1847, he was 
 
56 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 unanimously invited by the church and society to become 
 their pastor. With many misgivings as to the wisdom of 
 leaving his Presbyterian associations and his well-loved 
 parish in the West, Mr. Beecher was influenced primarily 
 by the evident improvement in his wife's health and also by 
 the marked heartiness and earnestness and activity of the 
 people who had called him to work with them, and decided 
 to accept the invitation; preferring it to a position offered 
 him with the old Park Street Church in Boston (where his 
 father and his brother Edward had preceded him), because 
 in Plymouth he should be able to begin the work in his 
 own way. From that day, during the forty years which 
 intervened until his death, his history and that of Ply- 
 mouth Church are one and the same. They are known to 
 all men in America, and throughout the English-speaking 
 world more widely than those of any other man or church 
 in Christendom. It will not therefore be necessary to do 
 more than touch upon a few salient points; and those, as 
 bearing upon his personality and methods of working. 
 
 When in October, 1847, Henry Ward Beecher assumed 
 the pastorate of Plymouth Church, he was thirty-four 
 years and four months old. His compact, vigorous fig- 
 ure, five feet nine inches in height; his long dark hair; 
 broad brow; large blue eyes, — now luminous with in- 
 tensity, now twinkling with merriment; rather large, 
 straight nose; peculiarly well formed mouth, mobile with 
 feeling; ruddy complexion; and a garb decidedly uncler- 
 ical, presented an unusual appearance. 
 
 The first thing he did was to have the pulpit cut away, 
 and upon the broad platform was set a rather low ma- 
 hogany desk, open beneath. He had the natural instinct of 
 the orator, and felt that for him to get at his listeners the 
 listeners must be able to see the speaker. Throughout 
 his whole career it is rather remarkable that one so 
 apparently careless of appearances should have been, as 
 this man was, uniformly successful in doing the right 
 thing so far as concerned all physical carriage in his pub- 
 lic appearances. His instincts were those of a gentleman, 
 and whenever he shocked the sense of propriety of church- 
 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH: PERSONAL TRAITS. 57 
 
 goers (as he occasionally did), it was never by any ungain- 
 liness or impropriety of action, but always by some sudden 
 and unexpected turn of thought, of a kind to which peo- 
 ple were unaccustomed in Sunday services. Yet, even so, 
 those little shocks to their conventional nerves invariably 
 resulted in arousing attention and fixing the listeners' 
 mind upon the thought to be presented. They were 
 sometimes the unconscious results of his original way of 
 looking at things, and sometimes the intentional arts of 
 the orator, who sought not to exhibit himself as a model 
 clergyman but to "catch men." 
 
 To shov/ the underlying reason why he took his stand 
 upon a platform rather than in the pulpit, read this little 
 passage from his " Lectures on Preaching:" — 
 
 " It is not necessary that a man, because he may not be able to 
 stand 'ike the statue of Apollo, should stand ungracefully. He 
 loses, unconsciously, a certain power ; for, although he does not 
 need a very fine physical figure (which is rather a hindrance, I 
 think), yet he should be pleasing in his bearing and gestures. A 
 man who is very beautiful and superlatively graceful sets people 
 to admiring him ; they make a kind of monkey god of him, and it 
 stands in the way of his usefulness. From this temptation most 
 of us have been mercifully delivered. On the other hand, what 
 we call naturalness, fitness, good taste, and propriety are to be 
 sought. You like to see a man come into your parlor with, at 
 least, ordinary good manners and some sense of propriety, and 
 what you require in your parlor you certainly have a right to ex- 
 pect in church. One of the reasons why I condemn these churns 
 called pulpits is that they teach a man bad habits ; he is heedless 
 of his posture and learns bad tricks behind these bulwarks. He 
 thinks that people will not see them. So with gestures. There 
 are certain people who will never make many gestures, but they 
 should see to it that what they do make shall be graceful and 
 appropriate. There are others who are impulsive, and so full of 
 feeling that they throw it out in every direction, and it is, there- 
 fore, all the more important that their action shall be shorn 
 of awkwardness and constrained mannerism. Now and then a 
 man is absolutely dramatic, as, for instance, John B. Gough, who 
 could not speak otherwise. It is unconscious with him. It is 
 inherent in all natural orators ; they put themselves at once, un- 
 consciously, in sympathy with the things they are describing." 
 
58 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 We shall return to this matter again when considering 
 Mr. Beecher's oratory, but meanwhile, it is significant of 
 cvhat his life and work among the people had done for 
 tiim during the ten years of missionary labor in the West, 
 that his first act when he found himself raised to an 
 Eastern pulpit was to get out of it nearer to his hearers. 
 
 He had accepted the responsibility of a position in the 
 :ity already called the " City of Churches," itself well fur- 
 nished with clergymen of ability and repute, and practi- 
 :ally a part of that greater city, its near neighbor across 
 the East River. As to comparing himself with others or 
 worrying about his new and untried field, these unneces- 
 sary girdings were entirely foreign to his nature. He 
 worked for the love of working; the grinding sense of re- 
 sponsibility he felt to be uncongenial to the faith and 
 trust of a Christian life. He refused to entertain anxieties, 
 but put in all the forces he possessed as a farmer puts in 
 his labor and his seed; and he left the germination, like 
 the sunshine and the rain, to the providence of God. He 
 says in one place: " In general I have never performed my 
 work but once; whereas many others perform theirs three 
 times, — first by anticipation; then in realization; and> 
 afterward by rumination." 
 
 He began as he afterward continued, and his own de- 
 scription of it will be the best. He says: — 
 
 " I have often been asked by what secret I retain health and 
 vigor under labors multiform and continuous. I owe much to a 
 good constitution inherited from my parents, not spoiled by 
 youthful excesses or weakened by over-study ; much also to an 
 early-acquired knowledge of how to take care of myself, to secure 
 invariably a full measure of sleep, to regard food as an engineer 
 does fuel (to be employed economically, and entirely with refer- 
 ence to the work to be done by the machine) ; much to the habit 
 of economizing social forces, and not wasting in needless conver- 
 sation and pleasurable hilarities the spirit that would carry me 
 through many days of necessary work ; but, above all, to the 
 possession of a hopeful disposition and natural courage, to sym- 
 pathy with men, and to an unfailing trust in God ; so that I have 
 always worked for the love of working." 
 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH: PERSONAL TRAITS. 59 
 
 With these interior impulses, and wise powers of guid- 
 ance and restraint; with a mind well stored by years of 
 studious reading and thinking; with ten years' growth in 
 the experience of working directly upon the souls of men, 
 and an original aptitude in the "art of putting things" by 
 which he had already grown facile and expert, it is not to 
 be wondered at that this man found himself instantly at 
 home in the turmoil of the great cities where thronged the 
 very game he was after — men. Lovers of the conventional 
 complained that he was not smooth, he lacked polish; which 
 perhaps was not without a certain amount of truth, for he 
 took hold like a new file. Not only individual men, but 
 the community at large, very soon felt that there was a 
 fresh and unusual kind of force at work. 
 
 The old church building was cramped and packed with 
 the throngs, and when after a few months it took fire and 
 was badly damaged, the people of the church saw that it 
 was their opportunity not to rebuild the old, but to build 
 anew ; and they reared the great broad-shouldered ampli- 
 tude of Plymouth Church as it stands to-day. 
 
 True to his intention of getting at the people, Mr. 
 Beecher had the organ, with space for a large volunteer 
 choir, set at the back of the platform, in front of the audi- 
 ence, thus thrusting the speaker well forward into the 
 midst of the throng. He did away with the broad middle 
 aisle, and filled that cold, blank space with people. The 
 pews were arranged, so far as possible, in circling fashion 
 about the platform. The galleries were about twice the 
 ordinary depth, and the seating capacity of the house about 
 twenty-seven hundred, although with the hinged aisle-seats 
 which they were soon compelled to add, the congregation 
 usually numbered about three thousand. Not a dollar was 
 spent upon unnecessary ornament, but everything was 
 plain and simple, the main object being to have a well- 
 lighted, well-ventilated, commodious audience-room, of 
 good acoustic properties, arranged to seat the people with 
 their faces convergent toward the platform, and, with the 
 great choir before them, forming a natural social circle 
 
So HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 in which it would be easy to focalize thought and feeling, 
 whether for instruction, prayer, or praise. 
 
 Mr. Beecher recognized the danger of bareness and lean- 
 ness which always hangs over the non-liturgical churches. 
 The Roman service, and to a great extent the Episcopal 
 service, touch the devout imagination, reaching toward if 
 not actually inspiring veneration and awe, and seeking for 
 chords whose response is worship; and he felt that the 
 characteristic fault of the plainer church services was their 
 preponderance of instruction and lack of provision for the 
 element of worship. This he proposed to supply, and with 
 a very grand success did supply, by means of music, and 
 especially by means of so interesting the entire audience 
 that it should not only listen and be played upon, but should 
 also take part. He was, in fact, together with that noble 
 old organist, John Zundel, the pioneer of congregational 
 singing in America. 
 
 It was not until 1855 that he succeeded in getting his 
 " Plymouth Collection of Hymns and Tunes " published, 
 and the people all furnished with words and music so as to 
 make Plymouth congregational singing the fine art that it 
 became shortly after that; and yet, from the very begin- 
 ning, with a large voluntary choir and a persistent urging 
 upon the congregation that they should take hold, and the 
 use of tunes that everybody knew, he did succeed in bring- 
 ing in that powerful aid, — that " provision for the esthetic 
 feeling, the fancy and the imagination and the more facile 
 emotions, which is not provided for by any framework fur- 
 nished to the preacher, and which, according to his various 
 abilities and endowments or moods, circumstances may or 
 may not have partially provided for in him." 
 
 In his instructions ("Yale Lectures on Preaching") on the 
 relations of music to worship, he goes very carefully and 
 suggestively into the function of the organ both in open- 
 ing voluntaries and interludes and in hymn accompani- 
 ments and closing voluntaries. 
 
 And speaking of John Zundel, he says : " To make 
 music to him means worship and the organ means religion. 
 . . . . So long had he been trained, that what words 
 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH: PERSONAL TRAITS. 6i 
 
 are to us, notes were to him; and he expressed every 
 thought and feeling that he had, upon the instrument. In 
 his inspired moments upon the organ, it has brought tears 
 to my eyes a hundred times; I have gone in jaded and 
 unheartened, and have been caught up by him and lifted 
 so that I saw the flash of the gates. I have been com- 
 forted, I have been helped, and if I have preached to him 
 and helped him, — ^and I know I have,— he has preached to 
 me and helped me; and he knows not and never will know 
 how much." 
 
 Mr. Beecher then gives his ideas of the choir and of con- 
 gregational singing and of the choice of hymns on the prin- 
 ciple of co-operation with the mood of thought or feeling 
 into which he wishes to bring his auditors; which show 
 the keenest susceptibility to the power of music in himself 
 and the quickest sympathy and intuitive knowledge of its 
 effect upon a gathering of persons brought together for a 
 purpose, and a remarkable capacity for philosophizing 
 upon the facts thus gained from experience and observa- 
 tion, with a facility for reducing them to a systematic 
 practice for subserving his own aims. Nor does he make 
 any cast-iron system, but in accordance with what more 
 and more appears to have been the plan of his whole life, 
 he deduces vital principles which must receive varied ap- 
 plication according to varying circumstances. 
 
 It was a common remark in those days that, whereas the 
 average church congregation was made up in the propor- 
 tion of five women to one man, in Plymouth Church the 
 proportion ran the other way. Men sought him because 
 he was strong and helped them, but women and little 
 children no less were attracted by his winning qualities. 
 The church flourished; it grew strong; it multiplied rapidly; 
 its Sunday-school was thronged; it began mission work in 
 the city, and in all practical ways offered prompt evidence 
 of the genuine value of the Christian inspiration it received, 
 by giving as bountifully as it had received. Strangers 
 quickly learned to seek it out; and in its proper work as a 
 Christian church, it soon entered upon a vigorous activity. 
 
 Basing his philosophy and his practical methods of 
 
52 HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 
 
 ittracting men to a higher life rather upon the facts of 
 luman nature, the teachings of Jesus, and the working 
 methods of the Apostles, than upon the skillfully devised 
 :heological systems of the schools (not, because he was 
 unfamiliar with the latter, but, because, knowing them so 
 (veil, he thought them less likely to be useful than the 
 methods of the earlier day) he naturally gained friends 
 Faster among the common people who heard him gladly 
 than he did among the professional members of the priest 
 tiood and conservators of the traditions of the elders. 
 
 And yet, even among those he found many firm and 
 constant friends. The broad foundation on which he 
 stood made him broadly liberal toward all beliefs which 
 accepted Christ and successfully labored to make men 
 Christ-like. Indomitable in the assertion of his own be- 
 liefs, he was no less vigorous in maintaining the rights of 
 others to theirs. One of his most characteristic sermons 
 is entitled " Other Men's Consciences." His church re- 
 ceived into its communion members from all the Christian 
 sects, who found there a common ground on which to 
 stand and to work. This commingling of elements gave 
 him a body of men and women knit together by the pro- 
 foundest sympathy in a simple faith and by an ardent 
 love for the man who had released them from the bonds 
 of petty sectarianism, and opened to them the larger lib- 
 erty of Christian manhood. 
 
 Among the most potent influences which Mr. Beecher 
 immediately developed in his new and peculiar church- 
 membership, was the social element. The strength of 
 associated hearts and wills and minds upon a common 
 object, the play of mutual sympathy, the possibility of 
 consentaneous purpose, was an element of human nature 
 upon which he counted much and with which he accom- 
 plished much. With the profoundest belief in the imma- 
 nence of God throughout all nature, including the spirit of 
 man, — indeed, in the direct influence of the Spirit of God 
 upon the souls of men, he was yet a sturdy believer in the 
 necessity of bringing about all effects through natural 
 causes. 
 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH: PERSONAL TRAITS. dj, 
 
 " The gifts of the Divine Spirit," he says, " are not exceptional, 
 or capricious, without rule, without definite purpose ; but they 
 are to be just as definitely expected as the results which the far- 
 mer seeks when he sows his seed. ... In regard to the whole 
 department of spiritual experiences, I say they are in analogy 
 with mental experiences ; not that they are on the same level, but 
 that the administration of God over the human soul is in analogy 
 with his administration over the lower or physical elements in 
 man, and the intermediate emotions of the social and the intel- 
 lectual processes. Spiritual developments are, all of them, under 
 law, administered by law, as much as any other part of nature, 
 and to be studied therefore as we study every other part of human 
 life. And in regard to the moral elements, all the graces of the 
 Spirit, and all the fruits of the Spirit are to be developed by edu- 
 cation just as much as any other part of the mind. . . . That 
 we perfect man's physical and intellectual nature by education, 
 every one knows. . . . but when we come to religion, men fly 
 the track. They seem to think, * Here is vagueness ; here is a 
 realm too sacred to suppose that law operates in it." And it is 
 just there that I say, in respect emphatically to revivals of re- 
 ligion, that they are conformable to law, and that that conform- 
 ableness to law lies in the foundation of knowledge and educa- 
 tion, in the production of emotion, and in the production and 
 conduct of all spiritual processes. . . . It is such statements 
 that many feel to be an upheaval of the foundations and a de- 
 parture from the faith of the fathers. ' Does not such a view as 
 this confound Nature and Grace .' Is it not bringing all gracious 
 operations down to the level of nature.' ' What is nature, then ? 
 . . . Everything that God ever organized into being or main- 
 tained is nature. . . . Wherever, along the lines of space, the 
 word of God has thrilled and something has happened, there is nat- 
 ure ; and nothing is or can be, that does not circle into that. To 
 reduce things 'to the level of nature,' then, is to reduce them to the 
 level of God, — which ought not to be a very great degradation ! " 
 
 In this very same lecture, in which Mr. Beecher was in- 
 sisting upon the necessity of using proper means for the 
 bringing about of spiritual, as well as physical, intellect- 
 ual, and moral effects, he was asked by one of the stu- 
 dents: — 
 
 " Would it not be consistent with your view to hold that 
 prayer is more essential to the production of a revival than it is 
 essential to the product of effects in farming ? " 
 
54 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 Answer: — 
 
 " Certainly. That is to say, prayer is more nearly related to 
 the result you want to produce. Guano is better for farming 
 than prayer, but prayer is the guano of spiritual life. Pray 
 ilways. The praying always means that the thought, the feeling, 
 the taste, the sense of pleasure, the social gladness, all the while 
 effervesce, so that they take the upward tendency, they report 
 themselves continually through the higher feelings towards God ; 
 md that I suppose to be prayer, — communion, God with us." 
 
 With these rather uncommonly sensible views, which on 
 the one hand may be called scientific, but which on the 
 other hand were inspired by the profoundest trust in God's 
 fatherly interest, and in the uniformity of the operations 
 of the Divine Power so that its laws are discoverable, Mr. 
 Beecher made much of the prayer-meetings. 
 
 The sense of God's fatherhood and of the naturalness of 
 approach to him, was most characteristic of his entire life 
 and work. 
 
 And this same atmosphere of the naturalness of the spirit- 
 ual life permeated and enveloped his every activity in 
 private and in public. It was what made his prayer- 
 meetings unique in all Christendom. The simple, hearty, 
 effective singing of the throng of seven or eight hundred 
 people, led compactly and yet sympathetically by a piano 
 played with a clear, firm touch; the informal, cordial, 
 friendly, joyous way in which he taught his people to come 
 into these meetings — at once the cause and the effect of 
 the sense of fellowship; the singularly intelligible, natural, 
 effective way in which Mr. Beecher always read the Bible — 
 utterly avoiding the professional " holy tone " but develop- 
 ing the spirit and meaning of the passage (whether simply 
 narrative, or dramatic, or devotional, or instructive, or 
 hortative) precisely as he would have done a passage from 
 any other book, led people into an interest before they 
 knew it. Then, the frank, familiar style in which he would 
 state the generic truth to be found in the Scriptural pas- 
 sage, — sitting meanwhile pleasantly in his chair; as rather 
 in social converse than in formal discourse, — bringing the 
 generic into the specific and multitudinous . with ready 
 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH: PERSONAL TRAITS. 65 
 
 illustration; the way in which he developed the gifts of 
 the different members by calling them out on some per- 
 sonal point of explanation, or making rapid and familiar 
 interplay of question and answer; the patience and tact he 
 showed with the inevitable bores; the variety he managed 
 to infuse from week to week, — all these things made his 
 prayer-meeting a power in the church itself, and a con- 
 stant attraction to outsiders. 
 
 In getting at the influences brought to bear upon Ply- 
 mouth Church, which made it what it was, it is necessary 
 to mention the frequent revivals of religion which took 
 place during the early years. Mr. Beecher's philosophy of 
 these occasional impulses, as already stated, was that they 
 were dependent upon regular laws, and yet that there are 
 favoring circumstances which determine times and seasons. 
 All methods are not alike wise, neither are all seasons alike 
 propitious. 
 
 "Among hundreds of revivals," he says, " I have known only 
 one that occurred in the midst of harvest ; because men cannot 
 spare the time from the harvest field. . . . Business has 
 much to do with times and seasons. For instance, sometimes 
 men are hot with speculation, and the whole air is full of it. 
 That is not a favorable time for any processes leading toward this 
 production of common moral feeling. ... As you adapt all 
 the economies of industry to the varying seasons, so you are to 
 adapt your moral culture of men to those peculiarities of God's 
 providence, which, with a little care and observation, every one 
 may discern. . . . It is not every man that plows well and 
 sows well, who gets his harvest; but still, that is the average 
 course of things, and the probability is such as to encourage 
 everybody." 
 
 And again: — 
 
 " We have occasion to bless God for these outpourings of the 
 Spirit, that come as the wind comes,we know not always whence, 
 and that go as the wind goes, we know not always whither, but 
 which, like the wind in the mariner's sail, may be so studied and 
 so used that there shall be over it a substantial cpntrol." 
 
 Mr. Beecher entered with zeal upon all these modes of 
 fertilizing his church, of calling into action its latent forces, 
 and of utilizing the forces so developed not only for the 
 
66 * HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 purpose of enlarging the numerical strength of the new 
 organization, but also of making it active in work, of mak- 
 ing it felt as a force for good in the community at large. 
 His wisely directed power was astonishingly successful in 
 effects. 
 
 Between 1847 and 1856 was a period when men's minds 
 were seething and fermenting. The excitement ran largely 
 along the lines of temperance agitation, and the growth of 
 the anti-slavery sentiment as a moral political force. 
 
 None felt more profoundly than he the working of that 
 reform-leaven. He knew intuitively that he was set at a 
 focal point. Finding himself in the midst of the intensest 
 commercial activities of the country, being essentially a 
 part of New York, although not within its civic boundaries; 
 seeing that the throngs who came week after week to his Sun- 
 day preachings, and Wednesday evening lectures, and Fri- 
 day evening prayer-meetings, were very largely composed 
 of active business men, a great proportion of whom were 
 between twenty-five and forty years of age, and recognizing 
 that as his church grew and consolidated it was made up 
 of much of this same element, he seems to have laid out 
 for himself then the general course that he consistently 
 pursued to the end. Not that he was gifted with preter- 
 natural foresight of what the years were to bring forth, 
 but that he had the sensitive temperament which brings 
 subtle knowledge of atmospheric disturbance. And in this 
 case it was a disturbance which aroused his whole nature 
 to preparations for the coming storm. In every aspect of 
 the reform questions of the day, which on all sides were 
 dividing men's sympathies and opinions, splitting organ- 
 izations, overturning established forms, he saw not so much 
 the superficial effects, as the underlying causes. To him, 
 political parties, Bible and Tract Societies, Missionary 
 Boards, Christian sects and churches, were always means 
 and not ends. Just as he turned away in disgust from 
 theological quarrels which in the name of God and things 
 holy he had frequently seen to degenerate into the most 
 scandalous personal enmities, so too, he looked at all the 
 organized instrumentalities of moral and religious instruc- 
 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH: PERSONAL TRAITS. 
 
 67] 
 
 tion among men,valuing them not for what they were called, 
 but for what they could do, and turned away from them as 
 valueless when they became the subjects of violent contro- 
 versy and bitter dissension instead of being instruments 
 for good. He judged men and institutions according to 
 that simple but searching test given by Jesus, " By their 
 fruits ye shall know them." 
 
 ''When they said to me, 'You are not orthodox,' I replied, 
 ' Very well, be it so ; I am out on other business : I understand 
 that call that has been sounding down through two thousand 
 years, and I will obey it : Follow me and I will make you fishers 
 of men.' 
 
 "What about 'original sin'? There has been so much actual 
 transgression that I have not had time to go back on to that." 
 
 It was thus his practical manner of applying broad gen- 
 eric principles to every present condition of human life 
 that made his genius effective. 
 
 And the first thing that he did to prepare for the great 
 conflict that had already begun and that was more and 
 more extending itself amid the various organizations of 
 the country, was to collect and to inspire with enthusiasm 
 for the fatherly God and the brotherly Saviour and the 
 needy human brotherhood, a body of men and women 
 who became a great center of power along those essential 
 practical lines. And as in regard to all other organiza- 
 tions, so in regard to Plymouth Church: while it was the 
 thing he loved best, yet it was always with him but a 
 means to the one great aim of his life. He did not set 
 himself to the purpose of making a " prominent church," 
 but, recognizing the great opportunity for effective work, 
 he leaped eagerly into the field and gathered his forces 
 together. 
 
 There can be little doubt that his main and indeed only 
 thought in all his wise and earnest labors in Plymouth 
 Church in those early days, was his strong desire to " catch 
 men," yet every fiber of his being was a-tingle with the 
 electric conditions of the time. He says: — * 
 
 *Address before the London Congregational Board, Sept. 28, 1886; from 
 "A Summer in England with H. W. Beecher " (1887). 
 
68 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 " I came insensibly into connection with public questions ; I was 
 sucked into the political controversies and the moral reformations 
 af the age ; and, just at that time, that question was coming up 
 ivhich involved every principle of rectitude, of morality, of hu- 
 manity, and of religion. My father was too old ; the controversy 
 :ame on when he was failing; he was cautious in hrs way; he was 
 ifraid that his son Henry would get himself into difficulties. But 
 [ tooli no counsel with man. When I came to Brooklyn, some 
 dear men who are now at rest said, with the best intention, ' You 
 have a blessed chance, and you can come to very good influence 
 if you do not throw yourself away ; ' and then warned me not to 
 preach on slavery and on some other topics which at that time 
 «rere up in the public mind. I do not know what it is in me — 
 whether it is my father or my mother or both of them — but the 
 moment you tell me that a thing that should be done is unpop- 
 ular, I am right there, every time. I fed on the privilege of mak- 
 ing men hear things, because I was a public speaker. I glorified 
 in my gifts, not because they brought praise, for they brought the 
 other thing continually; but men would come, and would hear, 
 and I rejoiced in it. . . . Jesus knows that for his sake I 
 smote with the sword and with the spear, not because I loved 
 controversy, but because I loved truth and humanity; and be- 
 cause I saw weak men flinch, and because I saw base men truckle 
 and bargain, and because I saw that the cause of Christ was likely 
 to suffer : and I will fight to the end." 
 
 It will not be expected that this sketch can enter upon 
 the details of Mr. Beecher's active life. His teachings were 
 vital, and as he laid more stress upon the Christian art of 
 right living than the theologic science of right dying, they 
 penetrated with power into many a circle, and aroused 
 torpidity to life. The elderly were startled and shocked; 
 the young were electrified and stimulated; the mercantile 
 community were stirred with both interest and anger at 
 his bold expositions of commercial temptation and dis- 
 honest practice; respectable politicians were angered to 
 find themselves openly coupled with those whom they 
 despised but with whom they were yoked in practical 
 politics. 
 
 Gifted with all his father's quick insight and genial 
 humor and forceful aptitude in exposition, but freed from 
 the theological partisanship which had been at once the 
 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH. PERSONAL TRAITS. 69 
 
 Strength and the limitation of the elder man's career, Mr. 
 Beecher had a fresh and original way of putting things, 
 even when the underlying thought was a familiar one, 
 which instantly arrested the attention of hearers or readers; 
 for he very soon began to write as well as to speak to the 
 public. It is not at all improbable that his singular lack 
 of verbal memory, making it impossible down to the end 
 of his life for him to cjuote anything except the briefest 
 and most familiar passages of the Bible (and hardly those 
 with accuracy) made many of his statements seem ques- 
 tionable simply because they were not arrayed in the 
 phraseology to which the orthodox religious minds were 
 accustomed. Looking at matters from the natural and 
 reasonable, rather than from the ecclesiastical and theolog- 
 ical side, he constantly availed himself of such truth as he 
 thought he found in the old doctrines without putting 
 them into the old language, and many earnest and excellent 
 men and women who were drawn into his church and felt 
 the stimulating power of his preaching, were yet in their 
 hearts troubled, because they missed the old familiar and 
 hackneyed phrases. 
 
 One of his earliest Brooklyn friends one day asked him: 
 " Mr. Beecher, do you believe in the divinity of Christ ? " 
 With surprise he answered, "I know no other God." "Do 
 you believe in the influence of the Holy Spirit?" "I be- 
 lieve," said he, "in the direct impact of God upon the 
 human heart. Is it possible that you do not yet know a 
 doctrine without its old-fashioned label tied to it ? " 
 
 Such misunderstandings in his very flock make it less to 
 be wondered at that his fellow-clergymen, who were soaked 
 and steeped in theologic terms, often failed to catch the 
 inner meaning of his talk because they missed the ancient 
 shibboleth. Moreover, it was not long before those keen- 
 sighted purveyors for the public taste and need — the 
 journalists — lit upon the fact that the people were inter- 
 ested in Beecher, and they began to report him in the daily 
 press. His own statement of the general result of this, as 
 made in his address before the New York and Brooklyn 
 Association of ministers and churches, in October, 1884 
 
70 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 while based upon the experience of many years, is yet an 
 apt putting of the case as it was from the first: — 
 
 "You must bear in mind that great as is their usefulness — and 
 I bear willing testimony to the great usefulness of the ubiquitous 
 body of reporters — they are not all apostolic in theology, they are 
 not Platos in philosophy, they are not all the most eminent dis- 
 ciples of the school of metaphysics, and they are set to do that 
 which not one man of genius even in ten thousand can do — ^the 
 rarest thing in the world — to put a discourse of one whole hour 
 into a reading-space of five minutes. To do that is one of the 
 supremest works of intellectual genius. But they are sent to the 
 churches as well as to other meetings, and are expected to make 
 a report that folks will read ; so they catch here and they catch 
 there shining passages, grotesque ones, or some that raise a little 
 laughter. They go over to the office and the night editor says : 
 ' I want a quarter of a column of Beecher.' ' Well, but I have got 
 a whole column." 'Cut it down, cut it down.' And they cut it 
 here and they cut it there, and keep in things that they think will 
 attract attention, — and that is the report of my sermon ! Well, I 
 do not blame them ; but I tell you what I do blame. I blame the 
 want of honor in ministers and editors who live within an hour's 
 walk or an hour's postage of my house, and who could write to 
 me and say, ' I see in the papers this morning such and such 
 things are reported as having been said by you. I wish to know 
 whether that is a correct representation of your views.' Not they ! 
 They sit down and write a long critique and send it to the Co7t- 
 gregationalist or the Advance or somewhere else, based on my 
 'views.' If it is worth my while, and I turn around and say, 'I 
 was misrepresented ; I didn't say so ; ' they will cry, ' Oh, he is 
 backing down as usual!' So then, for more than twenty-five 
 years, there is not a man on the globe that has been reported so 
 much as I have been — in my private meetings, in my street con- 
 versations, on the platforms of public meetings, and steadily in 
 the pulpit ; a great many times admirably, many times less ad- 
 mirably, and sometimes abominably. This has been going on 
 week after week, and year after year. Do you suppose I could 
 follow up all misstatements and rectify them ? . . . A man 
 might run around like a kitten after its tail, all his life, if he were 
 going around explaining all reports of his expressions and all the 
 things he had written. Let them go. They will correct them- 
 selves. The average and general influence of a man's teaching 
 will be more mighty than any single misconception, or misappre- 
 hension through misconception." 
 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH: PERSONAL TRAITS. 71 
 
 Thus it was that while he was constantly misappre- 
 hended, both in speech, in sentiment, and in general effect, 
 by means of these fragmentary reportings of tongue and 
 pen, ilevertheless his influence constantly enlarged among 
 those who had the opportunity or the sense to apprehend 
 his meaning and follow the general trend of his teaching. 
 
 Many attempted analyses of Mr. Beecher's powers as 
 orator and preacher have been made. Perhaps the best 
 was that made by Rev. Dr. Richard S. Storrs in his Ad- 
 dress at the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration (" Silver 
 Wedding") of Plymouth Church, in 1872. The following 
 selected passages (italics being ours) give somewhat of 
 his ideas: — 
 
 " The sources of that power in him, in which, during the last 
 twenty-five years, you have been all the while rejoicing, are very 
 deep and manifold. It used to amuse and provoke me, years ago, 
 when men would speak as if his strength lay in some one thing ; 
 in his voice, perhaps, or in his gesture, or his power of illustra- 
 tion, or something else. Some single element, it was now and 
 then thought, was the hair of this Samson, in which his strength 
 resided ; and if he were shorn of that he would become like other 
 men. Nonsense ! You know, as well as I do, that his power 
 comes from many sources. It is like a rushing, royal river, which 
 has its birthplace in a thousand springs. It is like a magnificent 
 oak, which has its grand uplift, of trunk and stem, and its vast 
 sweep of branches, by reason of the multitudinous roots which 
 strike down deep, and spread through the soil in every direction. 
 These supply the mighty timbers of the battle-ship and the build- 
 ing! 
 
 " Now, if I were to go, as I shall not, into a thorough analysis 
 of his power as a preacher, I should occupy your time for a great 
 while ; but there are certain elements of that power which are 
 familiar to you, and which redound, not to his praise or yours, 
 but to the praise of Him who made him what he is, and sent 
 him thither. 
 
 " First among these elements, I should put a thoroughly vital- 
 ized mind ; a mind so vitalized that itg very process becomes as 
 vital as himself ; so that there is no reproduction of past proc- 
 esses ; no memorizing of what has previously been in the mind. 
 His creative faculties are in play all the time. . . . 
 
 "I think I should put se.cond., immense common sense ; a won- 
 derfully self-rectifying judgment, which gives sobriety and sound- 
 
72 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 ness to all his main processes of thought. I don't know but I 
 have been more impressed by that in Mr. Beecher than by any 
 other one element of strength in him. A man who has not com- 
 mon sense, this sound, self-rectifying judgment, on which the 
 machinery of his mind is to work, flashes out very soon. . . . 
 
 " I should put next to this, I think, his quick and deep sympa- 
 thy with men ; his wonderful intuitive perception of moods of 
 mind, which makes these stand out before him like a procession 
 passing in the street. You say, 'This is genius.' Of course it is; 
 but it is the genius, you observe, not of the dramatist nor of the 
 poet ; it is the genius of the great Preacher, who catches his sug- 
 gestion, his inspirations even, from the eyes or the faces, shining 
 or tearful, of the people before him. 
 
 " Then, still further, comes that mental sensibility, that emo- 
 tional responsiveness, which has made him apt and ready for 
 every occasion, that responsiveness which is called for in every 
 minister, but which has been called upon in him more than any 
 other man, perhajJs, in the whole American pulpit, during the 
 last twenty-five years. He has never been found wanting in read- 
 iness for the occasion, no matter what the subject may have been, 
 or what the scene. His mind has been full of vigor, and has 
 kindled spontaneously, by collision with persons, or with themes, 
 or with circumstances, whenever the occasion has been pre- 
 sented. 
 
 " This intimate and immediate responsiveness to, and sympathy 
 with, subjects ,and occasions, is an immense gift — charming not 
 only, but always fertilizing, and always refreshing. 
 
 " Then put beyond that (for certainly it properly goes beyond 
 and farther off) his wonderful animal vigor, his fullness of bodily 
 power ; his voice, which can thunder and whisper alike ; his sym- 
 pathy with Nature, which is so intimate and confidential that she 
 tells him all her secrets, and supplies him with continual images ; 
 and, above all, put as the crown upon the whole that enthusiasm 
 for Christ to which he has himself referred this evening, and 
 which has certainly been the animating power in his ministry — 
 the impression upon his soul that he, having seen the glory of 
 the Son of God, has been set here to reflect that glory upon 
 others; to inspire their minds with it; to touch their hearts with 
 it ; to kindle their souls with it, and so to prepare them for the 
 heavenly realm — put all these together, and you have some of the 
 elements of power in this great Preacher — not all of them, but 
 some, snatched hurriedly from the great treasure-house. There 
 you have a few, at any rate, of the traits and forces of him whose 
 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH: PERSONAL TRAITS. 73 
 
 power has chained you, and quickened and blessed you, during 
 all these years." 
 
 The abounding physical vigor of the man, his sunny 
 good nature, the loving spirit with which he regarded his 
 God and every work of his Father's hands down through 
 all sorts and conditions of men, and animals, and plants, 
 to the face of inanimate nature; his quick sense of humor, 
 of the incongruities not only, but of the aptitudes of life; 
 and the fresh impulse by which his mouth uttered the 
 abundance of the heart, all these elements were a part of 
 his power; but also offered one of the most frequent objec- 
 tions made to him. Very frequently the ripple of a laugh 
 would run over the face of the congregation, and when 
 after the service the new-come listener, shocked to find 
 that he had laughed in church, stopped to analyze the 
 matter, he found that it was not mere fun or a joke at 
 which he had laughed, but that he had been startled by 
 some unlooked-for, unaccustomed simile, and that it was 
 quite as much the novelty of the idea and the surprising 
 deftness of the illustration which had provoked his risibles 
 as any sense of jocosity. Still, while this was the frequent 
 case, there was indeed no lack of humor in itself — though 
 never for itself, in public ministrations. He says: — 
 
 " To preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, to have Christ so melted 
 and dissolved in you that when you preach yourself you preach 
 Him, as Paul did, to have every part of you living and luminous 
 with Christ, and thus to make use of everything that is in you, 
 your analogical reasoning, your logical reasoning, your imagina- 
 tion, 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 the 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 
 worse of it for that — not a bit ! I have felt that man should con- 
 secrate 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." 
 
74 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 There is another point in this regard that may as well 
 be mentioned here. That is, that his humorous passages, 
 although perfectly natural and frequently unconscious, 
 were quite as often the result of intuition and intention. 
 In his " Yale Lectures," in answer to the question of one 
 of the students as to whether it was a proper thing to make 
 an audience laugh by an illustration, he replied: — 
 
 " Never turn aside from a laugh any more than you would from 
 a cry. Go ahead on your Master's business and do it well. And 
 remember this, that every faculty in you was placed there by the 
 dear Lord for his service's sake. Never try to raise a laugh for 
 the laugh's sake, or to make men merry as a piece of sensation- 
 alism, when you are preaching on solemn things ; that is allow- 
 ible on a picnic, but not in the pulpit, where you are preaching 
 of God and of man's destiny. But if a laugh comes up naturally 
 do not stifle it. Strike that chord ; and particularly if you want 
 to make an audience weep. If I can make them laugh, I do not 
 thank anybody for the next move ; I will make them cry. Did 
 you ever see a woman carrying a pan of milk quite full, and it 
 slops over on one side, that it did not immediately slop over on 
 the other also ? 
 
 " If you quote stale jokes ; if you make queer turns because 
 they will make people laugh, and to show that you have power 
 over the congregation, you will prove yourselves contemptible 
 fellows. But if, when you are arguing any question, the thing 
 comes upon you so that you see a point in a ludicrous light, you 
 can sometimes flash it at your audience, and accomplish at a 
 stroke what you are seeking to do by a long turn of argument ; 
 and that is entirely allowable. In such a case do not attempt to 
 suppress laughter ; it is a part of the nature God gave us, and 
 which we can use in his service. When you are fighting the 
 devil, shoot him with anything." 
 
 True to his instinct of keeping his sympathies alive to- 
 ward the people and entering into the life-conditions of 
 men whom he was trying to influence, he habituated him- 
 self to study men and seek them out. Saturday especially 
 he always made a play-day in preparation for Sunday. A 
 day of genial, pleasurable, social exhilaration, a day of 
 seeing agreeable things, of looking at pictures, of standing 
 on the street and watching the people and teams go by (he 
 was very fond of horses), of crossing the ferry and going 
 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH: PERSONAL TRAITS. 75 
 
 up into the pilot-house, where he was on friendly and famil- 
 iar terms with all the pilots, of going along the docks and 
 on to the ships, into ship-yards, into foundries and loco- 
 motive works. He liked to go to Tiffany's, where he would 
 ask, ' What are the men doing to-day ? ' And so, with some 
 member of the house he would go down to the ateliers and 
 watch the workmen silver-plating and engraving, and learn 
 to understand what they were doing, and why, and not 
 only that, but to get a sympathetic insight into their feel- 
 ings and ideas. Thus he constantly fed his heart with the 
 sympathies of humanity, refreshed his blood and nerves 
 and brain, and stored his mind with a great amount of 
 curious and interesting knowledge, which reappeared in 
 figures and illustrations and apt arguments. 
 
 In regard to his gathering of knowledge, which he was 
 diligently doing by incessant study of books and men, he 
 never did it in the formal and methodical way of having 
 each subject done up by itself, labeled and docketed and 
 filed away in its own pigeon-hole, but his broad mind re- 
 ceived facts and ideas much as the soil receives the seed, 
 and showers, and sunshine. They disappeared and became 
 a part of himself, to reappear in newer forms of vital 
 strength and beauty. 
 
 He was, and to the end of his life continued to be, a 
 great reader. He made close study of the constitutional 
 history of the United States, and was diligent in mastering 
 the ideas of great rulers. He found when he came to the 
 East great stores of intellectual and artistic wealth, which 
 opened to him new worlds. His pecuniary means were 
 already enlarged. He received at first fifteen hundred 
 dollars per annum, which was a large advance upon the 
 four hundred, and six hundred, of his Western pastorates, 
 and which, as the Plymouth society grew in wealth and 
 strength, was properly enlarged from time to time. He 
 made it a point to follow up in literature, as well as in 
 practical research, every topic that especially interested 
 him. Sometimes it was the general history of art, or the 
 special development of architecture, of painting, of sculpt- 
 ure, of engraving, of etching; and his library showed illus- 
 
]6 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 trations of all those splendid lines of thought and achieve- 
 ment: and it was not upon his book-shelves and walls alone 
 but in himself that could be found unusual stores of knowl- 
 edge. Music and organ-building; soap and cosmetics; 
 pottery and porcelains; large additions to his already ex- 
 tensive knowledge of flowers, trees, and methods of culti- 
 vation; general literature, history, theology, metaphysics, 
 natural science, and especially the whole line of philosophic 
 literature which tends towards the co-ordination of these 
 great departments; physiology, anatomy, and medicine, — 
 and in short a large array of books upon topics of interest 
 to all humanity, and therefore not foreign to him, bore wit- 
 ness to the incessant labor with which he stored his grow- 
 ing mind. 
 
 These things of course began by slow degrees and en- 
 larged and accumulated more and more rapidly as the 
 years increased his pecuniary means and his power of 
 assimilating the mental stores thus gathered. But the 
 point here is to show, his method, and to emphasize the 
 idea which he has in many places laid stress^ upon, that 
 genius is but the power of combustion, and needs fuel if it 
 is to produce light and heat. 
 
 There is always a temptation, in considering events 
 which have successively issued along a course of years, 
 to read the beginnings in the light of later developments. 
 From one point of view this is of course natural and nec- 
 essary, for we can better understand the bearings of early 
 matters when we have their consequences before us. For 
 our present purpose, however, we do not need to impute 
 undue wisdom to the mind of this young reformer, in 
 the idea that he foresaw all the wonderful crisis of his 
 first twenty-five years in Plymouth Church, but it is essen- 
 tial, as we believe, to a comprehension of his modes of 
 action and the resulting influence which he exerted, that 
 we insist from the first upon his disinterested, loyal, 
 ardent devotion to God as a power manifest in unselfish love 
 rather than in autocratic force; and the consistent applica- 
 tion of that belief as a guiding principle in all the affairs 
 of life. Out of this grew his intense devotion to the inter- 
 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH: PERSONAL TRAITS. 77 
 
 ests of man as God's child; his insistence upon the constant 
 need of the elevating influences of unselfishness as personi- 
 fied in Christ and the constant importance of infusing this 
 spirit into human institutions of every character, — the fam- 
 ily,the church, society, the city, the state, — all the outgrowths 
 of man's organic social tendency. If his life be followed by 
 the indications of this cardinal principle, it will be seen to 
 have been nobly persistent and earnestly steady. All 
 those variations which men have been accustomed to call 
 "inconsistency," "errors of judgment," "the great mis- 
 take of his life " (of which he committed a great many, 
 each one being "the greatest" according to the point of 
 view of the specific interests— personal, ecclesiastical, or 
 political — which he at the time opposed) will be seen to 
 have been impulses along the general line which he had 
 laid down for himself from the first, and by the inspira- 
 tion of which he builded the foundations and the super- 
 structure of Plymouth Church, that strong fortress of 
 human hearts, in which he abode and from which his 
 power went forth during forty years. 
 
78 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 V. 
 POLITICAL CAREER. 
 
 The portion of Mr. Beecher's work covered by this vol- 
 ume* grew directly out of his nature, training, convictions, 
 and the enlargement of his powers as set forth in the fore- 
 going chapters. It includes many of his appeals to the 
 public intelligence and conscience with reference to slavery, 
 freedom, war, and the general development of civil liberty 
 in the United States. The simplest way of getting at the 
 relations and the influence of these appeals will be to 
 make a brief running account of the public affairs of the 
 time, noting especially the points accented by the addresses. 
 
 The time covered by these addresses has been divided 
 into three periods: I. Freedom and Slavery, 1847-1861; 
 II. Civil War, 1861-1865; IIL Civil Liberty, 1865-1885. 
 
 The pivot upon which the history of the United States 
 turned during the entire fifty years of Mr. Beecher's public 
 work, was unquestionably American Slavery, with its con- 
 sequences. While his relations to it were the most notice- 
 able feature of his own life, the subject itself is of course 
 too large to be entered upon here except roughly; but the 
 facts that in it was the storm-center of all those tumultu- 
 ous times, and that — while thousands of other patriotic 
 and sensible Christian men, as well as pious Christian 
 ministers, were not able to see the dangers of it — this man's 
 love for the Father-God, and his esteem and sympathy 
 for his brother-man, were outraged by the existence and 
 still more by the attempted extension of that great evil, 
 give the key-note which must be accepted in order to 
 resolve his whole life into harmony. 
 
 *" Patriotic Addresses : In America and England, 1850 to 1885, on Slav- 
 ery, The Civil War, and The Development of Civil Liberty in the United 
 States. By Henry Ward Beecher. Edited, with a Review of Mr. Beech- 
 er's Personality and Influence in Public Affairs, by John R. Howard." 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 79 
 
 He conceived it to be his duty, not only, but his neces- 
 sity, to think, to speak, to instruct in all the higher views of 
 their daily duty the people who were following him; their 
 duty not only towards God but also towards their fellow- 
 men, — whether in the family, or more broadly in society, 
 or in the close interplay of commercial activities, or in 
 the still higher organic relations of the city and of the 
 state and of the country at large. And thus it was that, 
 whatever line of private or public duty made demands 
 upon individuals, the moral and spiritual side of it found 
 Henry Ward Beecher promptly at work, endeavoring to 
 throw light upon the practical path of right doing. 
 
 In a sermon entitled " The Sphere of the Christian 
 Minister" (January 24, 1869) occurs the following: — 
 
 "There is a popular impression — and it seems to men like a 
 philosophical truism — that every man understands his own busi- 
 ness best ; that he need not be meddled with, at least till he asks 
 advice ; and that even then no one can counsel him so wisely as 
 one of the same craft. Complaint is often made on that ground, 
 of ministers, that they meddle with things that they do not 
 understand. I think they do, too, when they preach theology. 
 There is an amazing deal of ' wisdom ' that will be called ' rubbish ' 
 one of these days. But when ministers meddle with practical 
 life, with ethical questions and relations, they are meddling with 
 just what they do understand, — or ought to. If they do not 
 understand these things, they have failed to prepare themselves 
 for one of the most important functions to which they could 
 address themselves, as ministers. . . . 
 
 "There is nothing, however, more untrue than that every man 
 understands his own business best, if by that you mean that he 
 understands it in its largest relations — in its results upon the 
 general welfare ; and more particularly if you mean that he under- 
 stands his own business best in its moral influence upon himself, 
 upon his fellows, and upon society. Usually, none understand 
 the moral bearing of a business so little as the men who are 
 embarked in it. . . . The baker knows more about kneading 
 dough, about the time it should require to rise, and about how 
 long it should be in baking ; but when it is done, and I take the 
 loaf and eat it, then I am as good a judge of bread as he is. And 
 so it is with various kinds of business. They bring out results 
 here and there, and the community is made to take the benefit 
 or damage, as the case may be. And moral teachers who stand 
 
So HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 md look on — who have discrimination, large reflection, clear in- 
 :uition, and who, above all, judge from a moral stand-point — 
 such men are competent to be critics of everything that there is 
 in human society. . . . The moment a man so conducts his 
 profession that it touches the question of right and wrong, he 
 :omes into my sphere. There I stand ; and I put God's measure, 
 the golden reed of the sanctuary, on him and his course ; and I 
 im his master, if I be a true seer and a true moral teacher ; and I 
 im not meddling. He has brought his business up to me the 
 moment when it comes into the sphere of right and wrong. . 
 
 "A man may preach politics too much. A man may do it fool- 
 ishly. So a man may administer a bank foolishly, manufacture 
 foolishly, or carry on any other business. foolishly; but that is no 
 reason why a bank should not be established, why a man may 
 not engage in manufacturing, or why business of any sort should 
 not be carried on. A minister may not be discreet in preaching 
 upon secular topics, but that is no reason why they should not 
 be preached upon. There have been indiscreet ministers from 
 the days of the apostles, and it would be strange if in the future 
 there should not be found here and there one that is not discreet. 
 But the duty of introducing such topics is now generally ac- 
 knowledged. I think that question is settled, for your life and 
 mine at least." 
 
 So it is; and it was settled very largely by the courage 
 and persistence, the intense moral earnestness, and the 
 large conservative wisdom of Henry Ward Beecher. Who- 
 ever will read the contents of this volume — which offers 
 examples of his newspaper writing, discourses in Plymouth 
 pulpit, political speeches pure and simple, and popular ad- 
 dresses on themes of general interest — will be struck, 
 from the point of view of the present time, with the 
 breadth and steadiness of his position in the earlier days 
 of excitement. His arguments are based on the law and 
 the constitution of the land as well as those of humanity, 
 and it is surprising to note his steadfast course, not only 
 amid the turmoil about him but also under the pressure 
 of his own interior impulsive forces. The strength of his 
 position and the wholesomeness of his advice — tempora- 
 rily enforced by his eloquence but generally justified by 
 events — went far to make his theory of the clergyman's 
 business practicable. 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 8l 
 
 Division I. — Freedom and Slavery. 
 
 Just at the time when young Beecher came *to Brook- 
 lyn (the autumn of 1847) the question of slavery had 
 again arisen for discussion in Congress and throughout 
 the country. The Mexican war, following on the heels of 
 the annexation of Texas in the interests of the extension 
 of slavery into new and unexhausted territory, had just 
 closed, although peace was not formally declared until 
 July 4, 1848. Florida, Iowa, and Wisconsin were shortly 
 afterward admitted as States; Texas also; gold was dis- 
 covered in California; and the admission of California 
 as a State was complicated with the attempted extension 
 of slavery into that territory as well as into Utah and New 
 Mexico. The " Free-soil Party " was organized among the 
 people in 1848, under the lead of ex-President Martin 
 Van Buren; the " Wilmot Proviso " in Congress, excluding 
 slavery from the new territories, was opposed by Mr. Cal- 
 houn's resolution limiting the right of Congress to inter- 
 fere; agitation grew hotter and hotter. Webster and Cal- 
 houn in the Senate only typified the growing excitement 
 throughout the country; for the seeds planted years before 
 by Giddings and Garrison and other heroes of conscience, 
 and wet with the tears and bloody sweat of social martyr- 
 dom, were slowly bearing their fruit, and from year to year 
 extending their harvests in the Northern soil. But the time 
 of triumph was a weary way off, — not yet to be descried 
 even by the eye of faith; nay, the fight seems to have been 
 carried on almost without hope, sustained only by a sturdy 
 love for God and mankind. 
 
 The late Senator H. S. Foote of Mississippi, in his "War 
 of the Rebellion, or Scylla and Charybdis,"* undertakes 
 to show that the " irrepressible conflict " between freedom 
 and slavery " could not have arisen but for the most un- 
 skillful and blundering management of the men in power — 
 the incessant agitation of sectional factionists, both in the 
 North and in the South, and the unwise disregard of that 
 august spirit of conciliation and compromise in which our 
 
 * New York : Harper & Brothers, 1866. 
 
82 HENRY WARD BEECHER.- 
 
 complex frame of government is known to have had its 
 origin." But he miscalculates what were the necessities 
 of slavery for more territory to grow in, and ignores the 
 deep hold which the spirit of freedom, in spite of political 
 and commercial interests, had upon the Northern people. 
 Far clearer-eyed were the anti-slavery men of the North, 
 on the one hand, and on the other men like Senator John 
 C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who was doubtless what Mr. 
 Foote describes him — " one of the most intellectual and 
 pure-minded men that have ever lived," and who held 
 the view that the free States and the slave States could not 
 continue to live together harmoniously, but the latter 
 would soon find it necessary to resort to separation^ 
 
 "Early in the eventful year of 1850," says Mr. Foote, " he 
 [Calhoun] avowed to me . . . his own painful and firmly 
 riveted conviction on this subject, and declared, in language of 
 extraordinary emphasis, that he regarded a peaceful withdrawal 
 from the Union as altogether practicable, provided its execution 
 should be attempted under the lead of Maryland and Virginia ; 
 making known at the same time that he had already drawn out 
 a Constitution for the new republic which he contemplated, in 
 which the slave-holding principle had been given a predominant 
 influence." 
 
 When, in 1850, after much heated discussion both in 
 Congress and throughout the country, Henry Clay, the 
 author of the Missouri Compromise of 1821, proposed to 
 Qonsolidate all past compromises involving slavery, — 
 covering the disputed subjects of Texas boundary, Utah 
 and New Mexico territories, California, partial abolition 
 of slavery in the District of Columbia, rendition of fugi- 
 tive slaves, and other matters — into one " Omnibus bill " of 
 thirty-nine sections, the excitement grew more intense than 
 ever. The essential element of the bill was the yielding 
 on the part of the South of the admission of California as 
 a free State, and on the part of the North the fugitive 
 slave clause, which not only allowed Southerners to re- 
 claim escaping slaves but made it the duty of Northern- 
 ers to help them. 
 
 In 1849 the Congregationalists had established in New 
 
1 
 
 POLITICAL CAREER. 83 
 
 York the weekly religious paper called The Independent, 
 having as its editors, Dr. Leonard Bacon, Dr. Richard S. 
 Storrs, Jr., and Dr. Joseph P. Thompson. To this paper 
 Mr. Beecher was asked to contribute; and, as the growing, 
 conflict between slavery and freedom was at that time the 
 motive of pretty much all political and much social andv 
 commercial activity, it was inevitable that that should be 
 the line of discussion most attractive to him. His utter 
 ances were so bold and ringing that the editors, highly as 1 
 they appreciated the value of his contributions, both as/ 
 moral forces and as journalistic attractions, did not care tol 
 be held responsible for them, and so it came about that hi^' 
 articles were usually signed with a star, or large asterisk. 'i 
 
 Many an article on all sorts and conditions of subjects 
 went into these " Star Papers," and made its mark upon 
 the sentiment and opinions of the times ; but the paper 
 which, it maybe almost said, made Henry Ward Beecher a 
 national rather than a local force was the one which stands 
 first in the " Addresses " reprinted in this volume, in the 
 division entitled " Freedom and Slavery," an article sin- 
 gling out from Mr. Clay's " Omnibus bill " its vital points, 
 and asking the question, " Shall We Compromise ? " 
 
 The Congressional agitation had been going on for 
 months. The North was profoundly stirred by the con- 
 test, discussing all the ins and outs of the complicated 
 legislative proposal. Thfe Independent had several strong 
 articles on the situation, but when on February 21, 1850, 
 this article appeared, disregarding the artificial complica- 
 tions and setting forth in all. plainness the issue — " Slavery 
 is right ; slavery is wrong. Slavery shall live ; slavery 
 shall die. Slavery shall extend; slavery shall not extend" 
 — it struck the key-note towards which succeeding events 
 toned up the North until Fort Sumter brought the great 
 outburst, and the war, begun by the South, killed slavery 
 and gave the South new life. The article was copied 
 everywhere, and cleared the atmosphere. The eyes of 
 many were opened. It penetrated to the South and ar- 
 rested the earnest attention of the dying Calhoun. Mr. 
 Beecher's position was that slavery must extend — or die; 
 
84 HENRY V/ARD BEECHER. 
 
 that it was both constitutional and morally right for the 
 North to refuse to consent to its extension, while it was 
 a base betrayal of the right to yield extension for the sake 
 of a temporary and fallacious peace. 
 
 But the conscience of the people grows slowly; and that 
 of their " representative " politicians and statesmen slower 
 yet. The fight in Congress went on, the Southern de- 
 mands growing higher and haughtier, until the most 
 trusted champion of the Northern views, Daniel Webster, 
 on the 7th of March lowered his banner and made the 
 famous plea for conciliation which, whatever its motive, 
 was his own final disgrace and death-blow. Calhoun, who 
 from his dying bed still sent his influence forth, had his 
 last address read in the Senate by Mr. Mason, and died on 
 the 31st of the same month. 
 
 After eight months of discussion, Mr. Clay's " Omnibus 
 Compromise " failed, but the several elements of it, in- 
 cluding the Fugitive Slave Law, passed singly, as separate 
 bills, during the ensuing summer (1850). 
 
 Of course the passage of these bills, which instead of 
 being merely a friendly arrangement of opposing policies 
 were really a compromise of moral principle, did not bring 
 peace. The year 1850 closed and 185 1 opened in the midst 
 of seething agitation. The " May Anniversaries " of the 
 various reformatory and religious societies formed a great 
 feature of those days in New York, and among the others 
 the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society was one 
 whose meetings in the old Broadway Tabernacle were al- 
 ways densely thronged, — and not always with sympathiz- 
 ers in the cause which the Society had at heart. 
 
 Mr. Beecher was from his first coming a favorite speaker 
 at those meetings, and in their turbulent audiences gained 
 much of the training that served him so well in later days. 
 In one of his speeches there, delivered May 9, 1850, he 
 had been exhibiting the necessity of slavery to keep men 
 brutal. " The slave," said he, " is made just good enough 
 to be a slave, and no more. It is a penitentiary offense to 
 teach, him more." Here a person in the gallery who had 
 been one of a group frequently interrupting the proceed- 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 85 
 
 ings, exclaimed, " It's a lie ! " The audience was shocked 
 into a kind of consternation, but Mr. Beecher promptly and 
 smilingly said: " Well, whether it is a penitentiary offense 
 or not, I will not argue with the gentleman. Doubtless he 
 has been there, and ought to know." Of course the tumultu- 
 ous laughter and applause gave him the immediate control 
 of the audience again, and he proceeded. 
 
 The second of the Addresses in this volume is one de- 
 scribing the nature of "American Slavery," which was 
 delivered before the Society on May 6, 1851. This address, 
 devoted to a discussion of American Slavery from the 
 stand-point of a Christian minister, was at once a helpful 
 impulse to all the anti-slavery workers, and a stinging 
 rebuke to the men of his own profession, who with notably 
 few exceptions systematically avoided mention of the sin 
 of those times. In one of his speeches in England, in 
 1863, Mr. Beecher said:^ 
 
 " You never can understand what emasculation has been caused 
 by the indirect influence of slavery. I have mourned all my 
 mature life to see men growing up who were obliged to suppress 
 all true conviction and sentiment, because it was necessary to 
 compromise between the great antagonisms of North and South. 
 There were the few pronounced anti-slavery men of the North, 
 and the few pronounced slavery men of the South, and the Union 
 lovers (as they were called during the latter period) attempting 
 to hold the two together, not by a mild and consistent adherence 
 to truth plainly spoken, but by suppressing truth and conviction, 
 and saying, ' Everything for the Union.' . . . They were at- 
 tempting to lasso anti-slavery men by this word ' Union,' and to 
 draw them over to pro-slavery sympathies and the party of the 
 South, by saying, ' Slavery may be wrong and all that, but we 
 must not give up the Union.' Not until the sirocco came, not 
 until that great convulsion that threw men as with a backward 
 movement of the arm of Omnipotence from the clutches of the 
 South and from her sorceress-breath — not until then was it, that 
 with their hundreds and thousands the men of the North stood 
 on their feet and were men again.'' 
 
 In this Anti-Slavery Society address may be seen others 
 of Mr. Beecher's felicitous dealings with interruptions 
 and questions from hostile hearers, put with the intent to 
 
86 HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 
 
 embarrass the speaker, but always having the opposite 
 effect of giving him a chance to turn the point against his 
 attackers. 
 
 The third address is an article from the Independent con- 
 cerning the notable Presidential contest of 1856, between 
 James Buchanan, the Democratic candidate, and John C 
 Fremont, the candidate of the newly formed Republican 
 party, which had grown up, suddenly but solidly, within 
 four years. 
 
 On the admission of California as a State, in 1850, Fre- 
 mont had been sent to Washington as one of its Senators. 
 In 1843-5, ^^ captain of a government exploring party, he 
 had located the passes of the Rocky Mountains, through 
 which to-day's immense railway traffic is pouring; in 1846 
 he had raised the " Bear flag " and declared the independ- 
 ence of California, and, by prompt co-operation on land 
 with Commodore Stockton by sea, had practically con- 
 quered and secured to the United States the possession of 
 that magnificent territory. He ha4 acted for some time 
 as Military Governor, and had taken prominent part in 
 forming the Constitution, being the man by whose in- 
 fluence the phrases that forever excluded slavery from 
 the State were incorporated into that document. Events 
 moved rapidly, both among the people and in Congress. 
 In 1 85 1 Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" appeared, and 
 thrilled the world with the dreadful possibilities of Ameri- 
 can slavery: the effect of that book cannot be overesti- 
 mated. In 1852 died Clay and Webster, while Charles 
 Sumner entered the Senate as Webster's successor from 
 Massachusetts: the day of compromises was passing. 
 
 The administration of Pierce, 1853 to 1857, was signal- 
 ized by the appearance of a new idea, put forth by Stephen 
 A.. Douglas, (Democratic) senator from Illinois, who, am- 
 bitious to reach the Presidency, proposed — as ^ measure 
 that should please the Democrats of both sections. North 
 and South — the Kansas-Nebraska bill, allowing the people 
 of those Territories to decide for themselves as to the exist- 
 ence or non-existence of slavery.when they should apply for 
 admission as States. This idea, popularly called " Squatter 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 87 
 
 Sovereignty,'-' was an express abrogation of the Missouri 
 Compromise of 182 1, as both Kansas and Nebraska lay- 
 north of the line agreed upon and fixed as the permanent 
 extreme northern limit of slave-holding States. The con- 
 test -was long and bitter, but the bill passed, and -was signed 
 by the President in May, 1854. Then followed the horrors 
 of " bleeding Kansas," the rush of immigration thither from 
 North and from South, and the hideous turmoil of border 
 -warfare. The free-soil men -were determined to save the 
 territory from slavery, and the pro-slavery men equally 
 determined to inoculate it with 'that cancerous disease. 
 Throughout the North the free-soil ardor grew and in- 
 tensified. Money, furniture, implements of industry, arms, 
 and ammunition were contributed for the use of the immi- 
 grants, who were exhorted to defend their own lives and 
 political rights, and to secure the territory for freedom. 
 Mr. Beecher and Plymouth Church took active part in all 
 this concentration of purpose and of force for the redemp- 
 tion of Kansas. The political tangle of the time is clearly 
 outlined in Ha);- and Nicolay's elaborate " Life of Abra- 
 ham Lincoln " (Century Magazine, 1887,) not only as to Mr. 
 Lincoln's debates with Douglas in Illinois (which did so 
 much to nationalize the name and just fame of the former), 
 but also as to the struggle in Kansas, it is shown how the 
 "border-ruflfian'' from Missouri was the convenient tool of 
 Southern policy to outvote and even to destroy the bona fide 
 settlers. '' 
 
 Mr. Beecher's activity at this time was marked and influ- 
 ential, but we have not found any single address which 
 seemed to represent his customary way of setting forth 
 the general principles of a particular crisis. 
 
 Out of the Kansas struggle came the beginning of the 
 Republican Party. The Free-soil Party had organized at 
 Buffalo under Van Buren, bolting from the Whigs, in 1848; 
 this was the germ: in 1852 the Whigs had finally gone 
 under, when Pierce was elected: in 1856 the Kansas troub- 
 les had permeated the entire North with discussion, and 
 the expression of resentment at the perfidy of the Com- 
 promise repeal took on increasingly the form of a deter- 
 
88 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 mination that slavery should not be extended, on any pretext, 
 into new territories. This was the heart of the declarations 
 of the new party; and John Charles Fremont, "the Path- 
 finder;" the conqueror of California; South Carolinian by 
 birth, but anti-slavery in principle; son-in-law of Senator 
 Benton of Missouri (a life-long Southern anti-slavery man, 
 and the projector of trans-continental traffic); husband 
 of the brilliant and fascinating Jessie Benton; — a man 
 combining a remarkable number of qualities, achieve- 
 ments, and associations to surround his name with a 
 halo of romance — was made the hero and the standard- 
 bearer. ' 
 
 The great cry of the Republicans was " Non-extension 
 of slavery ! " of the Democrats, " Non-interference with 
 Southern domestic institutions ! " and of a third party 
 (the "Americans," with Millard Fillmore as candidate), 
 " Peace at any price; peace and union ! " Mr. Beecher, 
 with the full consent of his church, threw himself into this 
 political contest with all the force of his nature. He 
 preached and spoke and wrote, constantly and vehemently. 
 He worked throughout the State of New York, speaking 
 two and three times a week, for three hours at a time, to 
 open-air audiences of from eight thousand to ten thousand, 
 and was universally recognized as a very potent factor in 
 the rapid growth of Republican sentiment. Besides this, 
 Fremont's campaign headquarters were in the business 
 office of one of Mr. Beecher's earliest friends and parish- 
 ioners; so that Plymouth Church had a large share in the 
 formation and early direction of the Republican party. A 
 new growth out of an old stem. Republicanism was cut 
 off frorn the decaying Whig stock, and, planted in justice 
 and nourished with the love of freedom, it increased 
 mightily in strength and bore glorious fruit. 
 
 Mr. Beecher's article (June 26, 1856) entitled "On 
 Which Side is Peace?" (reproduced page 196), pre- 
 sents the main theme of the discussions of that cam- 
 paign, and shows how unerringly he struck at the central 
 element of every matter in question. There was great 
 fear lest the South be angered by the election of a free- 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. ^9 
 
 soil President, and war ensue; but Mr. Beecher's pre- 
 diction, that war was much more likely to grow out of 
 further trugkling to the slave-power, in four years became 
 fact. 
 
 The success of James Buchanan (although Mr. Beecher 
 and many other leading Republicans believed that Fre- 
 mont was elected, but " counted out " in the returns from 
 Pennsylvania, a State whose large number of electors de- 
 termined that election) is well known. So also are the suc- 
 ceeding events of the next few years: Chief Justice Taney's 
 Dred Scott decision; the passing of personal-liberty laws in 
 several of the free States to counteract the Fugitive Slave 
 Law; the continued outrages and massacres of free-soil 
 settlers in Kansas; and finally the rash enterprise of old 
 John Brown of Ossawatomie, — a man always fanatical 
 and ill - balanced, and at last crazed by strife and the 
 murder of several of his family in Kansas, — who, with 
 seventeen companions, seized the United States arsenal 
 at Harper's Ferry, Va., with the hope of obtaining arms 
 and establishing an insurrectionary center for the libera- 
 tion of slaves. 
 
 It was on Sunday, October 30, 1859, while Brown and 
 his little company lay in prison awaiting trial, that Mr. 
 Beecher preached in Plymouth Church his sermon entitled 
 " The Nation's Duty to Slavery " (page 203). Its faithful 
 assertion of the principles of liberty and the abominations 
 of slavery, combined with Christian kindness to the South 
 and the duty of wise forbearance in action, — for the sake 
 of the slave, of the master, and of the country. North and 
 South, — shows the discretion, nobleness of thought, and 
 sincerity of belief in God and the force of moral ideas, 
 which go far to explain how it was that conservative peo- 
 ple felt willing to submit themselves to the influence of 
 Mr. Beecher's eloquence. No Southerner to-day would be 
 able to dissent from his doctrine as expounded in that dis- 
 course, or could help a warming of heart toward a man 
 who, in the midst of such a tempest of popular excitement 
 along the line of principles which he himself had done so 
 much to inspire, could yet so temperately and consider- 
 
90 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 ately and Christianly stretch forth the restraining hand of 
 wisdom. 
 
 Mr. Beecher's influence in the formative days of the Re- 
 publican party was wider than appeared on the surface. 
 He was in relations of friendly intercourse and interchange 
 of counsel with men like Horace Greeley and Henry J. 
 Raymond, the two journalists who were foremost in the 
 shaping of principles and policies, and all the leaders in 
 the reform-politics of the time looked to him not only for 
 the eloquent enforcement of courses laid out but for wis- 
 dom in preliminary councils. The newspapers reported 
 his every word, — in pulpit, lecture-room, prayer-meeting, 
 public assembly, special interview or casual street remark. 
 When we consider how constantly and mercilessly reports 
 of Mr. Beecher's utterances were put into the public prints 
 — sometimes correct, often erroneous, and even maliciously 
 perverted — and how unreservedly he poured forth at any 
 and all times his honest thought or feeling, it is amazing 
 that so much wisdom should appear in his history, and so 
 little foolishness. How many men could endure such a 
 record, — not once or twice, or during four years of a presi- 
 dential term, but for forty continuous years of public life 
 at the metropolis of the nation ? No other human being 
 has ever been put to such a test. His influence, then, was 
 in some sense atmospheric; it passed from him, consciously 
 and unconsciously; it spread abroad, and permeated not 
 only the great metropolitan community in which he lived 
 but the country at large. 
 
 Those who insist on a division line between "sacred" 
 and " secular " things can hardly understand how it should 
 be that this man, to whom all lines of life and duty were 
 sacred and infused with the conscious inspiration of divine 
 and human love, could pass as he did with his church from 
 the heats of the political struggle of 1856 into a period of 
 intense spiritual and religious labor. His theories, — the 
 healthfulness of enthusiasm, provided that a proper varia- 
 tion of its objects relieved the tension of one line of facul- 
 ties by bringing others into play; the natural modes of 
 
■ POLITICAL CAREER. 91 
 
 appropriation of the all-pervasive influences of the Divine 
 Spirit; and the practical strengthening effect of such 
 " seasons of refreshment " for work in the world, — seem 
 to have received justification at this time. From 1857 
 to 1859, Plymouth Church enjoyed a very high state 
 of religious activity and growth; at one time — in May, 
 1858 — as large a number as three hundred and seventy- 
 eight came into the church on the same Sunday: and the 
 works of beneficence and charity were proportionally 
 increased. 
 
 It was in October, 1859, that Abraham Lincoln was in- 
 vited to deliver a lecture in Cooper Institute, New York, 
 which he agreed to do if he might make it a discussion of 
 political questions. On February 27, i860, he made his 
 speech, and the Tribune of the following day said: "No 
 man ever before made such an impression on his first ap- 
 peal to a New York audience." Mr. Lincoln " went with 
 the multitude " to hear Beecher ; and naturally was not 
 only deeply interested in the preacher, but took pains to 
 see him, and in their social intercourse began a mutual 
 confidence and friendship that bore rich fruit for the nation. 
 Mr. Beecher became an ardent advocate of Lincoln's nom- 
 ination (which was made in Chicago, May 16, i860), was a 
 potent force in his election, and — in spite of his bombard- 
 ments of the Administration on the emancipation question 
 in the first two years of war — was one of the President's 
 most helpful supporters during his four awful years of 
 responsibility. 
 
 On Thanksgiving Day, November 29, i860, Lincoln hav- 
 ing been elected after a campaign of unparalleled intensity 
 — in which, as before, Plymouth Church and its pastor 
 were forward in active, every-day furtherance of the doc- 
 trines preached on Sundays — Mr. Beecher made a review 
 of the situation in a discourse entitled " Against a Com- 
 promise of Principle " (page 224). In it, after glancing at 
 the growth of Christ's kingdom all over the world, as 
 measured by the initiatory declaration of Jesus that he 
 came to teach, to heal, to deliver, the poor and the op- 
 pressed — the people — he rejoices at the practical national 
 
92 H&NRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 verdict against the extension of slavery as declared in Lin- 
 coln's election, and then appeals for manhood in the 
 maintenance of that position, not only in spite, but even 
 because, of the threatening storms: — 
 
 " It is always safe to be right ; and our business is not so much 
 to seek peace as to seek the causes of peace. Expedients are for 
 an hour, but principles are for the ages. Just because the rains 
 descend and winds blow, we cannot afford to build on shifting 
 sands. Nothing can be permanent and nothing safe in this ex- 
 igency that does not sink deeper than politics or money. We 
 must touch the rock, or we shall never have firm foundations." 
 
 About a month later, January 4, 1861, came a day which 
 President Buchanan appointed for national fasting and 
 humiliation and prayer, beseeching the Divine interference 
 in behalf of peace. Of course the South and its Northern 
 allies charged all the agitations to the fanatical opponents 
 of slavery. Mr. Beecher preached a sermon entitled " Our 
 Blameworthiness " (page 246), in which he showed that 
 the troubles were upon the nation because not too much but 
 too little had been done for liberty. 
 
 The winter passed; March came; Abraham Lincoln was 
 inaugurated president. The Southern leaders had already 
 found that Secession was easier to plan than to effect, for 
 throughout the South were many conservative Whig com- 
 munities, followers of the earlier teachings of Alexander 
 Stephens and his like, who sturdily held to the traditional 
 love for the old Union and distrust of their life-long po- 
 litical opponents, the Democrats. The South was not 
 "solid," at that time. But whatever forces men into mut- 
 ual association for common interest does very effectively 
 solidify their action, and, by narrowing the channels of 
 thought and feeling to a single line, unitizes their opin- 
 ions, for all practical purposes. To " fire the Southern 
 heart" and complete the severance which had been well 
 advanced, Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter were besieged, 
 fired on, and the gallant Anderson with his little force of 
 United States troops forced to lower the national flag and 
 march out. The political contest between " Freedom and 
 Slavery " was at an end. 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 93 
 
 Division II. — Civil War. 
 
 On Sunday, April 14, during the siege of Sumter, Mr. 
 Beecher preached from the text: "And the Lord said unto 
 Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me ? Speak unto the 
 children of Israel, that they go forward." — Exod. xiv. 15. 
 The discourse has been entitled " The Battle Set in Array " 
 (page 269), and introduces the second division of the Ad- 
 dresses, " Civil War." 
 
 The story of " the uprising of a great people " has been 
 well and often told.. Fort Sumter did a double work: 
 it fired the Southern heart, but it also aroused the North- 
 ern soul. Men were white hot with indignation; yet Mr. 
 Beecher's discourse of that day shows a calm, rational 
 pursuit of the history of the conflict, a discriminating in- 
 quiry as to the duty of the North in this crisis, before com- 
 ing to his solemn appeal for steady determination and his 
 final trumpet-blast of inspiration to " go forward " in the 
 cause of human liberty. 
 
 After this, the reader will find a succession of discourses 
 as to men's duties during the war, the titles of which are 
 largely self-explanatory. And any man who lived through 
 the intensities of that time is to be pitied if to-day he can 
 read, in cold type, these appeals to the highest and most 
 unselfish feelings of the heart without wet eyes and a 
 bounding pulse. The discourses are as follows: "The 
 National Flag," — on presentation of colors to two Com- 
 panies of the " Brooklyn Fourteenth Regiment ; " " The 
 Camp, its Dangers and Duties," — May, 1861; "Modes and 
 Duties of Emancipation," — November 26, 1861, setting forth 
 the declarations of Confederate Vice-President Stephens 
 as to Slavery being the "corner-stone " of the Confederacy, 
 and considering the condition of the thousands of escaping 
 slaves and the probable results of national emancipation; 
 "The Success of American Democracy," — April 13, 1862, 
 the anniversary Sunday of the attack on Fort Sumter, — 
 one of his felicitous tracings of the force of generic prin- 
 ciples in the development of events; "National Injustice 
 and Penalty," — September 22, 1862, just after Lincoln's 
 
94 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 preliminary Proclamation of Emancipation and Suspension 
 of the Habeas Corpus, — in strong maintenance of the Presi- 
 dent's war-powers and gratulation that at last the Nation 
 had officially repudiated the sin which had — by inevitable 
 action of physical and moral law — evoked such terrible 
 punishment; " The Ground and Forms of Government," — 
 November 22, 1862, — a philosophical consideration of the 
 character of peoples as the soil out of which their national 
 governments must and do grow, with especial reference to 
 a maintenance of moral principle in the then pending 
 election in the State of New York; and, finally, " Liberty 
 under Laws," — December 28, 1862, while the confirmatory 
 Proclamation of Emancipation was expected from the 
 President, — a discourse showing the necessity of obedience 
 to the law of any principle, in order to make that principle 
 effective, and the responsibilities of benevolent action for 
 the freedom of other men, which are assumed by those who 
 claim liberty for themselves. 
 
 These few sermons do not begin to indicate the conti- 
 nuity and intensity of Mr. Beecher's active exertions during 
 the years mentioned. He was one of the focal points of 
 heat and light, vitalizing the heart and clarifying the vision 
 of the country. In the newspapers, on the platform, in his 
 own pulpit and lecture-room, and in all manner of gather- 
 ings, he was always at work. To arouse and enlighten the 
 public conscience, to drive up the government to Emanci- 
 pation, and to sustain the authorities and the army in for- 
 warding the war to that end, as the only permanent, because 
 the only jUst, foundation for peace — this was his consuming 
 desire. In many powerful articles he urged Emancipation 
 on the President, whose apparent reluctance in that matter 
 was not then understood. In the light of later events, we 
 have learned, as Mr. Beecher did,- that Mr. Lincoln was 
 willing and glad to go just as fast and as far as he would 
 be sustained in doing by public opinion,* but no more. 
 
 * Fremont's Proclamation, in August, 1861, emancipating tlie slaves of 
 persistent rebels in the Department of tiie West, thrilled the North with 
 the idea that made possible Lincoln's larger announcement in September, 
 1862, — the power inherent in " military necessity." 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 95 
 
 Doubtless he was right; and yet it was needful that there 
 should be also such moral seers as Beecher to divine, and, 
 like flaming beacons on the headlands, to throw light upon 
 the course the people must take. 
 
 In the spring of 1863, Mr. Beecher was worn out with his 
 labors, for he had spared nothing of himself, and his physi- 
 cian and his Plymouth people pushed him off to Europe for 
 some months of recuperation. The narrative of this trip 
 in the companionship of his friend, Dr. John H. Raymond, 
 then president of Vassar College, has been told by both of 
 them, and may be found — full of beauty and interest and 
 refreshment — in Dr. Raymond's " Life and Letters " before 
 referred to (page 40). It was said at the time that Mr. 
 Beecher had been sent by the Government to try to influ- 
 ence English opinion; but that was of course untrue. He 
 went simply for rest, and in passing through England 
 refused to speak there at all, except at a complimentary 
 " Breakfast " tendered him by Congregational clergymen 
 and laymen in London. 
 
 His mind about it may be found in the following extract 
 from a private letter written at Brussels, Sept. 9, 1863, just 
 before the two friends started to leave the Continent: — 
 
 "John begins to feel homesick. His face is set toward the 
 West. Mine would be also but that I know not what I shall 
 have to do in England, and I do not wish to get up a fever of 
 returning and then find myself obliged to remain several weeks 
 longer. So I contrive not to think, except at intervals. How 
 glad I shall be if when in London I find that I need not speak ! 
 In truth, my friend, I have no heart for it. England is selfish 
 and cannot be made to recognize it. Her opinion of us has very 
 little value. We do not need her, and she is in little danger of 
 going into the fight. Why should we attempt to ameliorate her 
 prejudices and to thrust unwelcome truth down her incredulous 
 throat.' I should not hesitate to pass on, refusing to speak, but 
 for one circumstance. There is a struggling band of noble men 
 who from the first have been true to us and are advocating, 
 through good report and evil report, American ideas in England. 
 Should they say to me, 'You owe it to true friends who have 
 been faithful to you in the darkest hours, to strengthen their 
 hands and give them whatever influence your presence may exert,' 
 
96 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 I do not see how I could refuse to listen, and comply. But I long 
 to get-home. I am well, have escaped my catarrh, am rested, 
 and now desire to go to work again." 
 
 On his return to England he did speak, however, and all 
 the world knows how and with what effect. We have re- 
 produced, as prefatory to his speeches in England, the 
 article by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, which on Mr. 
 Beecher's return was published in the Atlantic Monthly for 
 January, 1864. It- is entitled " The Minister Plenipoten- 
 tiary," — a joke which, like most of Dr. Holmes's wit, is 
 instinct with wisdom and truth. This article (page 422) is 
 the best description of Mr. Beecher's extraordinary triumph 
 in England that has ever been published, and it shows the 
 profound effect which his unauthorized but splendidly au- 
 thenticated mission had, both abroad and at home. 
 
 The public speeches at Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, 
 Liverpool, London, and those at several farewell break- 
 fasts, follow next in the volume; and it has seemed of 
 especial interest to give also the essential portion of Mr. 
 Beecher's own account of the speeches (page 640) — not a 
 formal written document, but an off-hand talk to friends, 
 one of whom had thoughtfully provided the presence of 
 Mr. Ellinwood, for so many years, before and since, Mr 
 Beecher's regular stenographic reporter. 
 
 Following this is his address (page 654) delivered after 
 his return at the enthusiastic home-reception by his fellow 
 citizens of Brooklyn (November 19, 1863), in which he 
 describes to them how it was that the upper classes of 
 Great Britain were adverse to the Federal cause in the War 
 and yet were restrained from unfriendly action by the 
 great heart of the common people, who, although non- 
 voting, exercised a strong influence upon the governing 
 and commercial classes. It is — like portions of his speeches 
 in England — a rational and affecting appeal to men to 
 " Put yourself in his place " and look at things from other 
 people's point of view; to see the other side; to make 
 allowances for differing circumstances and consequent 
 opinions and sentiments; and so — in consonance with his 
 theological and religious teachings — a catholic plea for 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 97 
 
 liberty of opinion with harmony of feeling It produced 
 almost as marked an effect on American resentment against 
 England, as his efforts on the other side of the water did 
 upon English misunderstanding and prejudice against the 
 North, during the war. 
 
 The years 1864-5 entailed less exhausting work upon Mr. 
 Beecher than had been laid on him in the foregoing years. 
 The re-election of Abraham Lincoln in 1864 enlisted his ar- 
 dent efforts; but the tide of war had turned, and moreover 
 the entire enginery of the North had now become organized 
 and was in regular operation — socially, commercially, fis- 
 cally, industrially, and in all lines of material and moral 
 force — sustaining the Government as a matter of course. 
 Side currents there were, eddies of discontent and reaction, 
 turbulent passages caused by temporary obstructions, but 
 the great flood of life in all the Northern States flowed 
 full and strong in one direction. In March, 1864, Congress 
 revived the grade of Lieutenant-General in order to con- 
 fer it on Grant, whose continued Western successes had 
 drawn all eyes upon him, and he was brought to the East 
 and put in command of all the armies, with especial con- 
 trol of the Army of the Potomac, which, down to this time, 
 had done magnificent fighting but under generals who 
 allowed their victories to remain indecisive and fruitless. 
 
 This now was changed, and the battles of The Wilder- 
 ness, Spottsylvania, Five Forks, Petersburg, mark the 
 dreadful, bloody, but irresistible steps that led to Appo- 
 mattox and peace. On April 9, 1865, the Confederate 
 army laid down their arms, were paroled as prisoners of 
 war, and permitted to return to their homes. In the " Life 
 of Robert E. Lee" we read: "The victors were magnani- 
 mous ; they abstained from every appearance of insult 
 toward the vanquished. Abundant victuals were distrib- 
 uted to the prisoners who were dying of hunger." And 
 this was not only the official action of commanders, but 
 the Federal soldiers themselves, gallantly appreciating 
 the gallantry of their recent foes, joyfully fraternized with 
 them, offering their own rations, tobacco, and good fellow- 
 ship generally. 
 
98 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 Of men in responsibility, perhaps the two who had 
 borne the heaviest burdens of care, and who were person- 
 ally most interested in ending the rebellion, were President 
 Lincoln and General Grant. On March 28, occurred an 
 interview between the President and Generals Grant and 
 Sherman, at City Point, Virginia, at which time the two 
 soldiers thought that it would require one more severe 
 battle to compel submission. Mr. Lincoln was deeply 
 moved, exclaiming that there had been blood enough shed, 
 and asking if it could not be avoided. " That depends," 
 was the answer, "on Jefferson Davis and General Lee." 
 And to General Sherman* the President said that " all he 
 wanted for us was to defeat the opposing armies and to 
 get the men composing the. Confederate armies back to 
 their homes, at work on their farms and in their shops " 
 and " to restore all the men of both sections to their 
 homes." General Grant was like-minded, and upon Lee's 
 surrender urged the disbanding and separating of the 
 rebel armies. He imposed no humiliating conditions, but 
 sent home the disbanded Southern men with food and 
 seed-corn and even allowed them to take their horses for 
 the working of their farms. Sherman's impulses were still 
 more generous in receiving the surrender of Johnston's 
 North Carolina army, and Grant was sent to modify the 
 terms granted, making them conform to those given Lge 
 at Appomattox. In short, the men who spent themselves in 
 fighting the rebellion were the first and the freest in reconcilia- 
 tion with the conquered rebels. 
 
 The whole hollow Confederacy — exhausted and emptied 
 — now fell in. Among the hitherto resistant points was 
 the city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the active 
 rebellion began; now — desolated by war and fire and 
 poverty — it was re-occupied, and preliminary to the work 
 of restoring its obstructed harbor and rebuilding the shat- 
 tered shores, the Government thought it well to signal- 
 ize the downfall of Secession and the original treason of 
 attacking the national flag, by formally raising the stars 
 
 *Memoirs of William T. Sherman. New York : D. Appleton & Co., 
 
 1883. 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 99 
 
 and stripes on the ruins of Fort Sumter, whence they had 
 been hauled down April 14, 1861, four years before. The 
 ceremonies were imposing: all departments of the gov- 
 ernment were represented, and the governors of the loyal 
 States, with many invited guests of eminent position or 
 influence. Mr. Beecher was chosen, as the natural ex- 
 ponent of the loyal North, to deliver the oration of the 
 day; Major (by that time, however, Major-General) Robert 
 Anderson, the gallant commander of Moultrie and Sumter 
 under the " baptism of fire," with his own hands hauled up 
 the identical flag that had been lowered, and a salute of 
 one hundred guns was fired — participated in "from every 
 fort and rebel battery that fired on Sumter." Mr. Beecher's 
 oration (page 676) is a grand summing up of the four 
 dreadful years — their meaning, their suffering, their achieve- 
 ments; the benefits accruing from the war to the nation at 
 large, to the North, to the South; the lessons that had 
 been taught, and the spirit in which should be undertaken 
 the new work of "rebuilding the republic." With this 
 address is fitly closed the division of "Civil War," — an era 
 of great events that developed great men, yet a period 
 during which it is fairly within the bounds of probability 
 to say that the power exerted by the heart and brain of 
 Henry Ward Beecher was not equaled by the merely 
 personal influence of any other single man. 
 
 Division III. — Civil Liberty. 
 
 On the evening of the very day in which the nation's joy 
 was thus symbolized and expressed at Sumter, President 
 Lincoln was assassinated. That was on Friday: on Tues- 
 day the steamers brought the crushing news, and early 
 the next day the sad party were speeding northward again. 
 On Sunday of the following week (April 23), Mr. Beecher 
 made a discourse on "Abraham Lincoln." Said he: — 
 
 " Never did two such orbs of experience meet in one hemi- 
 sphere, as the joy and the sorrow of the same week in this land. 
 The joy of final victory 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 
 
100 HENRY WARD BEECH ER. 
 
 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. . . . 
 
 " In one hour, under the blow of a single bereavement, joy lay 
 without a pulse, without a gleam, or breath. A sorrow came that 
 swept through the land as htige storms sweep through the forest 
 and field, rolling thunder along the sky, disheveling the flowers, 
 daunting every singer in thicket or forest, and pouring blackness 
 and darkness across the land and upon the mountains. Did ever 
 so many hearts, in so brief a time, touch two such boundless feel- 
 ings? It was the Uttermost of joy; it was the uttermost of sor- 
 row ; — noon and midnight without a space between ! " 
 
 We have selected this discourse (page 497) as the open- 
 ing address of the division entitled "Civil Liberty," be- 
 cause in it is to be found recorded the sentiment of the 
 great President in relation to the land he died for, and 
 the spirit of conservative wisdom and Christian consider- 
 ation which was shown by Henry Ward Beecher as an in- 
 structor of the people in the trying times that followed. 
 
 The salient points were: Faith in American institu- 
 tions; a determination to see slavery finally ended; and a 
 spirit of generous conciliation towards the vanquished 
 South. 
 
 " The blow, however, has signally failed. The cause is not 
 stricken; it is strengthened. This nation has dissolved — but in 
 tears only. It stands, four-square, more solid, to-day, than any 
 pyramid in Egypt. This people are neither wasted, nor daunted, 
 nor disordered. Men hate slavery and love liberty with stronger 
 hate and love to-day than ever before. The Government is not 
 weakened, it is made stronger. How naturally and easily were 
 the ranks closed ! Another stepped forward, in the hour that the 
 one fell, to take his place and his mantle. . . . Republican 
 institutions have been vindicated in this experience as they never 
 were before. . . . God, I think, has said, by the voice of 
 this event, to all nations of the earth, ' Republican liberty, based 
 upon true Christianity, is firm as the foundation of the globe.' 
 
 " Even he who now sleeps has, by this event, been clothed with 
 new influence. . . . Men will receive a new impulse of pa- 
 triotism for his sake, and will guard with zeal the whole coun- 
 try which he loved so well : I swear you, on the altar of his mem- 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 101 
 
 ory, to be more faithful to the country for which he has perished. 
 Men will, as they follow his hearse, swear a new hatred to that 
 slavery against which he warred, and which in vanquishing him 
 has made him a martyr and a conqueror : I swear you, by the 
 memory of this martyr, to hate slavery with an unappeasable 
 hatred. Men will admire and imitate his unmoved firmness, his 
 inflexible conscience for the right ; and yet his gentleness, as ten- 
 der as a woman's, his moderation of spirit, which not all the heat 
 of party could inflame, nor all the jars and disturbances of this 
 country shake out of its place : . I swear you to an emulation of 
 his justice, his moderation, and his mercy." 
 
 These three articles of faith were soon to be put to the 
 test. It is hardly necessary here to enter upon a full dis- 
 cussion of the theories that arose at the end of the war as 
 to the " rebuilding of the republic," and yet some note 
 must be made of them to understand the continuity of 
 Mr. Beecher's course, and the first variance between his 
 line of action and that of the Republican party. 
 
 The elements to be harmonized at that time were many 
 and discordant. Mr. Beecher tersely says (page 736): — 
 
 " President Lincoln had been assassinated, and Johnson had as- 
 sumed his place. The statesmen whose vigor and courage had 
 carried the country through the civil war were less adapted to 
 the delicate task of restoring the discordant States to peace and 
 unity than they had been to the sudden duties of war. 
 
 " In a general way there were two parties ; one counseling a 
 speedy re-adjustment, and the other, a longer probation. 
 
 " President Lincoln and Governor Andrew of Massachusetts, in 
 the last conversations which I had with them, inclined to the 
 policy of immediate restoration; and their views had great weight 
 with me." 
 
 President Johnson, a man arisen, like Lincoln, from the 
 " poor white " class of a border State, had been a sturdy 
 Tennessee Unionist throughout the war, and had suffered 
 bitterly from the rebellion. He hated secession and its 
 leaders with an almost savage hatred, and was conspicuous 
 after Lincoln's death among those who cried that " treason 
 should be made odious." He instituted the military com- 
 mission that tried the conspirators who compassed Lin- 
 coln's murder, and proclaimed large rewards for the capt- 
 
[02 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 lire of Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders. 
 He even wished to arrest General Lee, but General Grant 
 sturdily blocked that procedure. The President was a 
 good man for a fight, but a dangerous one for the adjust- 
 ments of a peaceful settlement. 
 
 Mr. Johnson, however, was loyal, not only to the Union, 
 but also to the plan for its restoration which his great 
 predecessor, Lincoln, had mapped out; and upon this 
 he squarely planted himself. Its chief feature was: that 
 the seceded States should be replaced as they had been, 
 except that they should first, as States, acquiesce in the 
 abolition of slavery, repudiate the rebel debt, and repeal 
 the ordinances of secession. 
 
 President Lincoln had already, a year and a half before 
 (December, 1863), issued a proclamation of pardon and 
 restoration of the rights of property (except in slaves) to 
 all rebels who should abandon their purposes and take the 
 oath of allegiance, agreeing to abide by the governmental 
 acts and proclamations concerning slavery; and, moreover, 
 providing for a reorganization of any State government 
 by not less than one-tenth of the number of voters of the 
 State. His views were positive and clear. 
 
 The Thirty-eighth Congress had closed its session a 
 month before the collapse of the rebellion, on March 3, 
 1865; Lincoln's assassination was on April 14; the next 
 Congress was not to assemble till December 4: so that 
 Mr. Johnson came into the presidency during an interval. 
 The rebellion had suddenly ceased to be; and it was neces- 
 sary to act. The constitutional provisions which made it 
 possible for the Government to move steadily forward, with- 
 out hesitation or convulsion, — even in the face of such colos- 
 sal events as the instantaneous silence of peace after four 
 clangorous years of war and the assassination of the head 
 of the nation in the midst of the protections of a great 
 capital, — were at the time the wonder and admiration of 
 the world. And it is right, in judging of the acts of a man 
 of Mr. Johnson's antecedents and nature, — strong and hon- 
 est as an ox, stubborn and vengeful as a mule,— that we 
 should consider what would naturally be the mental atti- 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 103 
 
 tude of one thus unexpectedly placed in position of great 
 responsibility. Mr. Lincoln — sagacious and patient, while 
 tenacious of his purposes — would probably have assembled 
 Congress in extra session; and, acting by influence rather 
 than by authority, having the gratitude of the South and 
 the confidence of the North, would perhaps have found 
 means of letting, Congress have their say while they gave 
 him his way. But some elation after so sudden a rise was 
 natural to Mr. Johnson or the average man (Mr. Lincoln 
 was not an average man); and thus the new President 
 boldly accepted the responsibility of action and assumed 
 the power. 
 
 He issued an amnesty proclamation, excepting from it 
 all who, after having been civil or military officers of the 
 United States, had held office under the so-called Con- 
 federacy. Between May 29 and July 13 he appointed Pro- 
 visional Governors over seven States, with instructions to 
 assemble Constitutional Conventions which should form- 
 ally accept the terms and conditions above mentioned, 
 and then proceed to elect State legislators and congres- 
 sional representatives. This was all done; and the State 
 legislatures also elected their United States Senators, so 
 that nearly all were ready to enter the Thirty-ninth Con- 
 gress on its assembling, Dec. 4, 1865. 
 
 The President's plan was good, as far as it went; but, 
 first, it was incomplete, making no provision for the status 
 of the liberated slaves; and, secondly, he made the mistake 
 of acting in time of peace as if under martial law, and of 
 usurping for the Executive functions that belonged to the 
 Legislative branch of the United States government. Of 
 course this instantly bred hot dissatisfaction, and the sum- 
 mer of 1865 was filled with cries of increasing dissonance 
 throughout the North. 
 
 In October, shortly after returning to his pulpit from his 
 summer rest, Mr. Beecher preached a discourse (which will 
 be found at page 713), entitled, "Conditions of a Restored 
 Union." In this, as was usual with him, he carefully went 
 over the antecedent grounds of fact and of principle, — 
 in reference to the war, the end of the rebellion, the condi- 
 
104 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 tion of the South and its people, white and black, the Presi- 
 dent's ideas and acts, — and then laid down the lines along 
 which he conceived that the country could best be re- 
 united, with the most equitable and therefore the most 
 secure hope of permanent stability. 
 
 A few sentences selected from successive portions of the 
 discourse, although not immediately connected, may give 
 briefly the drift of his thought: — 
 
 " I can scarcely regard the state of mind that has existed for 
 years in the South as other than a political insanity, and I cannot 
 expect, nor ask you to expect, that in one hour they will get over 
 their enmities, their life-long prejudices and their humiliation. 
 . . . We are to remember that convalescence is often slower 
 and longer than the run of the disease itself." 
 
 " Nor are we to demand a surrender of theories and philoso- 
 phies as a condition of confidence and trust. . . . Let men 
 say that secession ought to have been allowed — if they accept the 
 fact that it is forever disallowed by the people of this continent." 
 
 " It is said that there should be a spirit of humility on the part 
 of the South, . . . that God does not receive sinners back till 
 they are humbled. When you are God you need not receive your 
 brethren back till they are humbled." 
 
 " I think that he will be the wisest and most politic statesman 
 who knows how to carry them through this terrible and painful 
 transition with the least sacrifice of their pride, and with the 
 greatest preservation of their self-respect ; and if it can be done 
 by the generosity of the North, a confidence will spring up at the 
 South in the future that will repay us for the little self-sacrifice 
 that we may make." 
 
 " I am anxious that those who have hitherto been most active 
 for liberty and humanity should produce the first and deepest 
 impression on our brethren in the South by real kindness ; and I 
 am very thankful that those who have been representative men 
 in the North, in the main — Gerritt Smith, Mr. Garrison, and 
 others such as they — have been found pleading for lenity, and 
 opposed to rigor and uncharitableness." 
 
 " It is desirable, on every account, that the South should be 
 restored at the earliest practicable moment to a participation in 
 our common government. It is foreign to our American ideas 
 that men should be dispossessed of civil rights, if we expect to 
 treat them in any other way than as criminals." 
 
 " But there are some conditions precedent." 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 105 
 
 "It is right that State conventions should be required to 
 abolish slavery, and to assist in the amendment of the Constitu- 
 tion of the United States in that regard." 
 
 ■■ And they must, in convention, not only annul their act of 
 secession, but pronounce it to have been ab initio void." 
 
 " I think that, also, before the States of the South are re-in- 
 stated, these conventions should have ascertained, and prescribed, 
 and established, the condition of the freedman. They should 
 have established, first, his right to labor, and to hold propertj', 
 with all its concomitants. They should have established his 
 right to labor as he pleases, where he pleases, and for whom he 
 pleases, and to have sole and undivided the proceeds of his own 
 earnings, with the liberty to do with them as he pleases, just as 
 any other citizen does. They should also have made him to be 
 the equal of all other men before the courts and in the eye of the 
 law. He should be just as much qualified to be a witness as the 
 man that assaults him. He should be under the protection of 
 the laws, with all the opportunities of availing himself of their 
 benefits which any other citizen has." 
 
 " It would have been wise, also, for these conventions to have 
 given him the right of suffrage — for it is always inexpedient and 
 foolish to deny a man his natural rights." 
 
 " I do not think it consistent with the nature of our institutions 
 for the Federal Government, in and of itself, to attempt perma- 
 nently to take care of four millions of freedmen by military gov- 
 ernment. These men are scattered in fifteen States; they are 
 living contiguous to their old masters ; the kindness of the white 
 men in the South is more important to them than all the policies 
 of the nation put together. And the best intentions of the gov- 
 ernment will be defeated if the laws that are made touching this 
 matter are such as are calculated to excite the animosity and 
 hatred of the white people in the South toward the black people 
 ■ there. I except the single decree of emancipation. That must 
 stand, though men dislike it. A true and wise statesmanship 
 consists in conciliating the late masters, and persuading them to 
 accept the freedmen in a spirit of kindness and helpfulness. Call- 
 ing names, suspecting motives, objurgations, will not help the 
 black man. President Johnson thinks it better that the colored 
 people should receive their rights with the consent of the South ; 
 and he waits for it, and influences rather than commands ; and I 
 think he is acting with enlightened judgment." 
 
 "We are to educate the negroes, and to Christianly educate 
 them. We are to raise them in intelligence more and more, until 
 
Io6 HENRY WARD BEE CHER. 
 
 they shall be able to prove themselves worthy of citizenship. 
 For, I tell you, all the laws in the world cannot bolster a man up 
 30 as to place him any higher than his own moral worth and nat- 
 ural forces put him." 
 
 " We have, then, a heavy work before us. We have a work that 
 wrill tax our faith, and patience, and resources. But it is a work 
 which we may pursue, believing that He who hath brought us 
 thus far in it will carry us through to the end." 
 
 If this discourse be carefully read, it will be seen to con- 
 tain the essence of all the guaranties and conditions finally 
 effected after years of renewed struggle under the Recon- 
 struction Acts; but it differed from the position of the 
 political leaders of the time in that it preferred to offer 
 these conditions to the Southern people for their acceptance 
 before inviting their participation in the government, while 
 the Republican managers preferred to have Congress impose 
 them, in the guise of penalty for rebellion. Mr. Beecher 
 read human nature well. But his " magnanimity " was 
 laughed at and his position fiercely denounced as an aban- 
 donment of the blacks; his forebodings of the alternate 
 evil, however, were terribly realized in history. 
 
 For by this time the political passions of all sides were 
 aroused. The Republican leaders, fearful lest the Presi- 
 dent should commit irretrievable blunders, and bring in 
 anew a Southern element which should unite with the 
 Democratic opposition of the North and weaken their 
 power, were blind to anything good in the Johnson plan or 
 man, and the political press was wildly violent; the Anti- 
 slavery element, with the exception of some of the wisest 
 and most notable of the old-time leaders, fearful lest the 
 fruits of their long and bitter warfare for freedom should 
 be sacrificed in the very hour of victory, were with the 
 foremost in denunciation of the President and all who 
 supported him. And, on the other hand, Mr. Johnson, 
 made angry by the outcry, was not only stubborn in hold- 
 ing to what he had done but evinced his weakness by tak- 
 ing pains to show disfavor to representative Northerners, 
 and favor to Southerners, who shrewdly began to pay court 
 to him. His action was impolitic to the last degree. Yet, 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 107 
 
 inborn and inbred prejudices will tell, in spite of reason; 
 and this " poor white," whose whole life had been a deter- 
 mined struggle to rise in the social scale, could not see his 
 aristocratic fellow Southerners at his feet without feeling 
 the flattery of the situation, and yielding to it. 
 
 In December Congress reassembled; but while the South- 
 ern States had, as above stated, gone forward and made 
 their preparations subject to the conditions demanded by 
 the President, under full expectation of admission to the 
 national legislature, their representatives were met by 
 Congress with a prompt refusal of admission and referred 
 to a committee on credentials, who kept them cooling their 
 heels and heating their tempers in the lobby; the various 
 grounds of opposition to their entrance being the illegality 
 of the acts of the Constitutional Conventions, of the writs 
 under which the legislators and congressmen were elected, 
 and other proper points of technicality which President 
 Johnson and the Southern reorganizers had in their haste 
 overlooked. 
 
 Meantime the first action of Congress (Dec. 18) was the 
 admirable one of proposing the Thirteenth Amendment 
 to the Constitution, by which slavery was forever abolished 
 and Congress given power to enforce the provision by 
 appropriate legislation. This was promptly ratified by 
 the requisite two-thirds of all the States, Northern and 
 Southern. But the winter passed in strife, the point of 
 keenest discussion being the condition of the freed slaves: 
 the President demanding that the States should be ad- 
 mitted, and allowed to regulate that themselves; the major- 
 ity in Congress demanding full National protection to the 
 freedmen before any of the States should be readmitted. 
 Indeed, the contest now took on the aspect of a question 
 as to the Restoration or the Reconstruction of the Southern 
 States. 
 
 But another element was all this time rising into promi- 
 nence and increasing power, and that was the ancient race- 
 prejudice of the Southern whites towards the blacks, and 
 their dread — born of the intemperate contest between Pres- 
 ident Johnson and his opponents at the North— lest the 
 
lo8 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 negro should be given political power, or, as they expressed 
 it, "the bottom rail put on top." That was, in effect, the 
 thing threatened at the North (for the protection of the 
 negro and the continuance in power of the Republican 
 party) and regarded at the South with a mingled feeling 
 of terror and unutterable detestation. 
 
 To get a candid view of the ideas and mutual miscon- 
 ceptions that this era bred in the two peoples — for the 
 South and the North had been educated, and still con- 
 tinued, on two distinct and unrelated planes of political 
 and social life — one cannot do better than read Judge 
 A. W. Tourgee's remarkable study of those times, based 
 on his own experience and observation of seventeen years' 
 residence as a Northern man at the South after the war: 
 "A Fool's Errand; By One of the Fools.'' Discussing the 
 plans of reconstruction, he notes the fact that none of 
 them took any account of 
 
 " That strange and mysterious influence which ranges all the 
 way from a religious principle to a baseless prejudice, according 
 to the stand-point of the observer, but always remains a most un- 
 accountable yet still stubborn fact in all that pertains to the 
 governmental organisms of the South, — the popular feeling in 
 regard to the African population of that section. That a servile 
 race, isolated from the dominant one by the fact of color and the 
 universally accepted dogma of inherent inferiority, to say noth- 
 ing of a very general belief of its utter incapacity for the civiliza- 
 tion to which the Caucasian has attained, should be looked on 
 with distrust and aversion, if not with positive hatred, as a co- 
 ordinate political power, by their former masters, would seem so 
 natural that one could hardly expect men of ordinary intelligence 
 to overlook it. That this should arouse a feeling of very intense 
 bitterness when it came as the result of conquest, and the free- 
 dom enjoyed by the subject-race was inseparably linked with the 
 memory of loss and humiliation in the mind of the master, would 
 seem equally apparent. But when to these facts was added the 
 knowledge that whoever should advocate such an elevation of 
 the blacks, in that section, was certain to be regarded as putting 
 himself upon their social level in a community where the offender 
 against caste becomes an outlaw in fact, it seems impossible that 
 the wise men of that day should have been so blind as not to 
 have seen that they were doing the utmost possible injury to the 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 109 
 
 colored race, the country, and themselves, by propounding a plan 
 of re-organization which depended for its success upon the effect- 
 ive and prosperous administration of State governments by this 
 class [the negroes] in connection with the few of the dominant 
 race, who, from whatever motives, might be willing to put them- 
 selves on the same level with them in the estimation of their 
 white neighbors." 
 
 In view of these facts it is not strange that the rebuffed, 
 humiliated, and alarmed Southerners should in their State 
 legislatures begin to make laws for the practical subjection 
 of the freedmen, who were already talked of as not only 
 freed but to be made the equals of their late owners, and 
 who, with political power in their hands, in places where 
 they were a majority of the inhabitants, would become the 
 practical rulers. The laws made by the new Provisional 
 Southern State legislatures were in truth oppressive and 
 unjust to this unfortunate class, thus ground between the 
 upper and the nether millstone; and were in turn met in 
 Congress by the Civil Rights Bill, which not only declared 
 the blacks citizens, with equal rights before the law, but 
 provided many specifications looking to social as well as 
 political equality with the whites — which of course inten- 
 sified the feeling tenfold. The bill, vetoed by the Presi- 
 dent, was repassed over his veto (April 9, i866), as were the 
 Freedman's Bureau and Refugees Bills. In June, Congress 
 proposed the Fourteenth Amen'dment to the Constitution, 
 providing: — 
 
 (i) The citizenship and equality before the law of all persons 
 born or naturalized in the United States ; (2) the apportionment of 
 representation in the Federal Congress according to the number 
 of inhabitants in each State [z. e., counting all the negroes instead 
 of two-thirds of them as heretofore, when their masters voted on 
 them, as slaves], any abridgment of voting privileges except for 
 crime to reduce the representation proportionately [a political 
 inducement not to prevent the blacks from votingl ; (3) the exclu- 
 sion of all men, who had violated an oath to support the United 
 States Constitution, from Federal or State office until relieved of 
 this disability by a two-thirds vote of Congress [practical dis- 
 franchisement of all Southern men of prominence]; and (4) the 
 validity of the United States debt and invalidity of the rebel debt 
 or any claim of compensation for loss of slaves. 
 
no HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 It was two years (1868) before this amendment was 
 adopted by the requisite number of States, and meantime 
 the political fight raged. In August, 1866, the sentiment 
 of those in the North who for various reasons thought that 
 President Johnson's plan was the wiser, even though it had 
 been unwisely forwarded by him, and who believed that 
 the quickest and most natural, and therefore the most en- 
 during, road to peace and relations of mutual interest be- 
 tween the negroes and the whites (who must have the labor 
 of their former slaves) would come by the gradual re- 
 adjustment of industrial, social, and political conditions 
 between those elements themselves, without outside inter- 
 ference, took shape in several conventions deprecating the 
 policy of Congressional enactments on these matters. One 
 of these assemblies was convened in Cleveland, Ohio, that 
 of the "Soldiers and Sailors" (who having had active share 
 in putting down the rebellion had some opinions to offer 
 about the treatment of the rebels), and invited Mr. Beecher 
 to act as its Chaplain. He could not go, but on August 30, 
 1866, wrote a letter to the Convention, giving his views on 
 the situation. It became known as "the Cleveland Letter.'' 
 
 After making several points: — no place for a State under 
 our theory of government except in the Union; the in- 
 crease of complication by every month of delay; the unfit- 
 ness of the Federal Government to exercise minor police 
 and local restraint; scorn of the fear that the impoverished 
 South would again rule the land if admitted — he gave the 
 following analysis of the position of the freedmen, for 
 whose freedom it must be remembered he had spent the 
 chief power and interest of his whole previous public life. 
 
 " The sooner we dismiss from our minds the idea that the 
 freedmen can be classified and separated from the white popula- 
 tion, and nursed and defended by themselves, the better it will be 
 for them and us. The negro is part and parcel of Southern 
 society. He cannot be prosperous while it is unprospered. Its 
 evils will rebound upon him. Its happiness and re-invigoration 
 cannot be kept from his participation. The restoration of the 
 South to amicable relations with the North, the re-organization 
 of its industry, the re-inspiration of its enterprise and thrift, will 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. m 
 
 all redound to the freedman's benefit. Nothing is so dangerous 
 to the freedman as an unsettled state of society in the South. 
 On him comes all the spite, and anger, and caprice, and revenge. 
 He will be made the scapegoat of lawless and heartless men. 
 Unless we turn the Government into a vast military machine, 
 there cannot be armies enough to protect the freedmen while 
 Southern society remains insurrectionary. If Southern society 
 is calmed, settled, and occupied, and soothed with new hopes and 
 prosperous industries, no armies will be needed. Riots will sub- 
 side, lawless hangers-on will be driven off or better governed, and 
 a way will be gradually opened to the freedmen, through educa- 
 tion and industry, to full citizenship, with all its honors and 
 duties. . . . 
 
 " If the colored people have the stamina to undergo the hard- 
 ships which every uncivilized people has undergone in its upward 
 progress, they will in due time take their place among us. That 
 place cannot be bought, nor bequeathed, nor gained by sleight of 
 hand. It will come to sobriety, virtue, industry, and frugality. 
 As the nation cannot be sound until the South is prosperous, so, 
 on the other extreme, a healthy condition of civil society in the 
 South is indispensable to the welfare of the freedmen." 
 
 Let any man read that letter; then ponder the demoniac 
 madness developed in the South during the years that 
 followed, when the Ku - Klux Rebellion gradually took 
 form against what the Southerners deemed a wanton in- 
 tention to humiliate and degrade them, and, increasingly, 
 against the rise of the negroes to political power not only 
 of votes but of office, — the days when the few steadfast and 
 intelligent Unionists of Northern and Southern birth who 
 undertook to guide the movement at the South were over- 
 whelmed by the mass of ignorance and rapacity that took 
 possession of legislatures and governing positions, and 
 who made the name of the " Carpet-Bag Governments " a 
 badge of shameless robbery. Let him then read the sec- 
 ond of these "Cleveland Letters," (page 742) addressed by 
 Mr. Beecher to his church, through one of its members, 
 replying to the excited letters and protests that came 
 pouring in upon him from all about, — a letter that reaffirms 
 the first, but with more elaborate reasoning and explana- 
 tion, and with a distinct repudiation of the absurd violence 
 and " increasing indiscretions " of President Johnson, who 
 
112 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 in the mean time had been "swinging round the circle" 
 with wild speeches and almost frantic denunciations of all 
 who took the right of differing from what he called " my 
 policy." Looking at Mr. Beecher's prophetic utterances 
 and their striking verification, the reader must be struck 
 with the clear-eyed foresight of political conditions and 
 after-developments, and also with the masterly quietude of 
 a great man's spirit in the midst of turbulence and peril — 
 not physical danger, but the greater evils of disruption 
 in friendly, social, political, and ecclesiastical ties, that 
 threatened him. 
 
 As this point marks real divergence between Mr. Beecher 
 and his party — although he continued to act with thi3m 
 because their aims and general direction were more nearly 
 his own than were those of the other party — it is worth 
 while to bring out a little more clearly his position; not 
 that it is, or was, at all questionable, if men would judge 
 tiim by his own utterances, but that their partisan blind- 
 ness made his critics incapable of seeing two sides to a 
 question. 
 
 In his second letter Mr. Beecher says (we italicize some 
 phrases) : — 
 
 " Upon the assembling of Congress [De'c, 1865] I went to Wash- 
 ington. I found Southern men lying prostrate before Mr. Johnson, 
 ind appealing to his tender-heartedness, — for he is a man of 
 kind and tender heart, — disarming his war-rage by utter submis- 
 sion. I found Northern men already uttering suspicions of his 
 fidelity, and, conscious of power, threatening impeachment. The 
 men who seemed alive to this danger were, unfortunately, not 
 those who had the management of affairs. Bad counsels pre- 
 vailed. The North denounced and the South sued : we see the con- 
 •iequences. 
 
 " Long after I despaired of seeing the President and Congress 
 harmonious, I felt it to be the duty of all good men to leave no 
 influences untried to lessen the danger and to diminish the evils 
 which are sure to come should the President, rebounding from 
 the Republicans, be caught by those Northern men who were in 
 sympathy and counsel with the South throughout the war. I 
 shall not attempt to apportion blame where 60th sides erred. It 
 is enough to say that unity secured at the seat of Government 
 would be a noble achievem.ent of leadership. 
 
REDUCED FA C-SIMILE. 
 
 First Page, Manuscript Notes 
 
 OF Address by 
 
 Henry Ward Beecher, 
 
 Brooklyn Academy of Music, November ig, 1866, following the publication 
 of the "Cleveland Letters." 
 
 Ct£%i^ y^,3^<:2r /^>fc^ , ^'^U.^h.^e^ u.^ c/ <:^t^^^^^^ 
 
 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. IIJ 
 
 "Deeming the speedy admission of tlie Southern States as 
 necessary to their own health, as indirectly the best policy for 
 the freedmen, as peculiarly needful to the safety of our Govern- 
 ment, which, for the sake of accomplishing a good end, incautious 
 men are in danger of perverting, I favored, and do still favor, the 
 election to Congress of Republicans who will seelt the early admis- 
 sion of the recusant States. Having urged it for a year past, I 
 was more than ready to urge it again upon the Representatives to 
 Congress this fall. 
 
 " In this spirit and for this end I drew up my Cleveland letter. 
 T deem its views sound; I am not sorry that I wrote it. I regret 
 the misapprehension which it has caused, and yet more any sor- 
 row which it may have needlessly imposed upon dear friends. 
 As I look back upon my course, / see no deviation from the 
 straight line which I have made, without wavering, for now thirty 
 years in public life, in favor of justice, liberty, and the elevation of 
 the poor and ignorant." 
 
 And to show how serenely he viewed the whole affair, 
 while hundreds thought him ruined forever because he 
 dared differ from the other opinion-shapers of the party 
 and from the majority of his own friends, this paragraph 
 is apt : — 
 
 " The attempt to class me with men whose course I have opposed 
 all my life long will utterly fail. / shall choose my own place, 
 and shall not be moved from it. I have been from my youth a 
 firm, unwavering, avowed, and active friend of all that were op- 
 pressed. I have done nothing to forfeit that good name which I 
 have earned. I am not going weakly to turn away from my settled 
 convictions of the public weal for fear that bad men may praise 
 me or good 7nen blame. There is a serious difference of judgment 
 between men as to the best policy. We must all remit to the 
 future the decision of the question. Facts will soon judge us." 
 
 In a private letter written by Mr. Beecher about the time 
 of the foregoing controversy, recently published in the 
 Christian Union in its report of a day of " Beecher reminis- 
 cences" held this summer (1887) in Litchfield, Connecti- 
 cut, appears the following: — 
 
 " I desire that the constitutional amendments proposed should 
 all be passed, except that of disfranchisement, which I think 
 needless, as Congress has power to reject any who are sent from 
 the South who are disloyal. To oblige the South to disfranchise 
 
114 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 their most trusted and honored men is an unnecessary humili- 
 ation; and to use the Constitution as a mere criminal law to 
 punish men with, to foist into it provisions to meet a transient 
 exigency, is to set a dangerous example and pervert our funda- 
 mental law for no good end. ... I believe that the great 
 body of the American people of the South, who are honest and 
 have been misled, would have come back with a sense of gratitude 
 for the leniency with which they had been treated. Now, they 
 are in danger of feeling that they have been trodden down by 
 their conquerors." 
 
 In corroboration of this forecast read the words of the 
 author of " A Fool's Errand " (written and published in 
 1879), who certainly will never be charged with an undue 
 partiality for Southern views, but who does show a remark- 
 able power of understanding what he does not accept, and 
 who speaks thus of the disfranchisement of the leaders: — 
 
 " Among the peculiarities which marked the difference between 
 Northern and Southern society was one so distinct and evident, 
 one which had been so often illustrated in our political history, 
 that it seems almost impossible that shrewd observers of that his- 
 tory should for a moment have overlooked or underestimated it. 
 This is the influence of family position, social raiik, or political 
 prominence. Leadership, in the sense of a blind, unquestioning 
 following of a man, without his being the peculiar exponent of an 
 idea, is a thing almost unknown at the North : at the South it 
 is a power. Every family there has its clientelage, its followers, 
 who rally to its lead as quickly, and with almost as unreasoning 
 a faith, as the old Scottish clansmen, summoned by the burn- 
 ing cross. . . . 
 
 " It [disfranchisement] was a fatal mistake. The dead leader 
 has always more followers than his living peer. Every hench- 
 man of those lordlings at whom this blow was aimed felt it far 
 more keenly than he would if it had lighted on his own cheek. 
 The king of every village was dethroned; the magnate of every 
 cross-roads was degraded. Henceforward, each and every one 
 of their satellites was bound to eternal hostility toward these 
 measures and to all that might result therefrom." . . . 
 
 " Time went on ; and, twelve years from the day when Lee 
 surrendered under the apple tree at Appomattox, there was an- 
 other surrender, and the last of the governments organized under 
 the policy of reconstruction fell into the hands of those who had 
 inaugurated and carried on war against the Nation, who had 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 115 
 
 openly opposed the theory of reconstruction, had persistently 
 denied its legality or the binding nature of its promises, and had 
 finally, with secret, organized violence, suppressed and neutral- 
 ized the element on which it had depended for support." 
 
 In brief, the political power given to the blacks over the 
 heads of the whites resulted, first, in a chaos of misgovern- 
 ment; then in a new rebellion which annihilated the blacks 
 as a political element, and solidified the whites. When 
 that had been effected, came peace; not instantly but grad- 
 ually. The blacks, no longer feared, were at first tolerated, 
 then their value as an inseparable element of the commu- 
 nity began to tell, and by degrees the natural development 
 of self-interest had its opportunity in solving the question 
 of the common citizenship of the two races. 
 
 Now, at the end of twenty years, we can appreciate how 
 the processes which have latterly advanced so far in har- 
 monizing the heterogeneous elements of Southern life (to 
 quote Mr. Beecher's prophetic phrase, " occupation, new 
 hopes, prosperous industries, education,") are at last hav- 
 ing their normal effect: not perfectly, — for even the North 
 is not yet in all respects perfect in the smooth working of 
 its political, judicial, monetary, industrial, and varied cor- 
 porate organisms! — but hopefully. 
 
 Passing on, then, from this important phase of Mr. 
 Beecher's public ministrations, we may rapidly review the 
 next decade, during which the Congressional scheme of 
 Reconstruction was doing its work, for good and evil, and 
 Mr. Beecher retained his connection with the Republican 
 party, and, with the lapse of conflict (for he never was an 
 " irreconcilable," and despised controversy that had no prac- 
 tical end in fair view), regained his influence in all directions. 
 He had not, in the slighte.st degree, given any reason to 
 think that he wished to go over to affiliation with the pro- 
 slavery "Copperhead" Democracy of that time, but he 
 had with might and main striven to hold the Republican 
 party and the President together, and to carry out the 
 restoration of the Union according to the spirit and plan of 
 the lamented Lincoln and that which his own broad mind 
 and generous heart told him was the simpler, safer, speed- 
 
Il6 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 ier way — of consulting the facts of human nature. The 
 effort had failed, by reason of strenuous wills attempered 
 to war and incapable of sudden change to the sagacity of 
 peaceful coutisels. He quietly left the arena, and held his 
 peace. He was not one who insisted that his way was the 
 only way: he recognized the patriotism, and ability, and 
 wisdom of the majority of his party's leaders, and, while he 
 felt that they were taking the longest road, he loyally ac- 
 cepted the route chosen and made the best of the good he 
 found in it. In his church his influence had not been 
 seriously shaken. His remarkable power of indignation 
 and even invective, when roused by an infraction of the 
 rights of others, was never used, or even suggested by 
 any expression or phrase, when his own liberty of ac.tion 
 was assailed. He had trained his people to independent 
 thought and expression of opinion, and, while his sensibili- 
 ties were undoubtedly hurt by many intemperate and 
 harsh words from partisans during the heat of the contest, 
 he spoke none himself, but with steady, sweet-tempered 
 dignity kept his hold both on their respect and their love. 
 And after the cloud had passed they felt a little ashamed, 
 — not of their opinions, but of the way in which they had 
 expressed them. 
 
 The next of the " Patriotic Addresses " is a discourse 
 on " National Unity," preached in Plymouth Church, Nov. 
 i8, 1869 (Thanksgiving Day). It is a large view of the 
 possibilities of feuds and disintegration in our vast coun- 
 try; discussing the disturbing influences, — immigration, 
 religious sectarianism,, long continued physical prosperity, 
 and clashing of commercial interests between various sec- 
 tions (especially Eastern and Western), and also the hope- 
 ful elements, — intelligence (and its spread by religious 
 discussion, books, and newspapers), the common-schools 
 (and the need of keeping them free, and especially the 
 growing necessity of making them unsectarian), and a sin- 
 gle political agency, the constitutional Rights of the States 
 (to secure wise local administration and maintain the 
 dignity and power of National Sovereignty). It is a noble 
 and most suggestive discourse, and in its discussion of un- 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. U7 
 
 sectarian common-schools, and of the rights of the States, 
 shows a profound knowledge of the Constitution and of 
 the true principles of our Federal government as inter- 
 preted since then by the Supreme Court. 
 
 In 1868 General Grant had been elected President, enter- 
 ing upon his office in March, 1869, and in 1873 upon his 
 second term. In both the political campaigns of Grant's 
 election, Mr. Beecher took hearty interest and with helpful 
 effect. The nullification of the colored vote at the South 
 resulted in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, 
 proposed by Congress in 1869 and adopted by the States 
 in March, 1870, providing that the right of suffrage should 
 not be withheld from any citizen of the United States 
 '■ on account of race, color, or previous condition of servi- 
 tude.'' Political affairs at the South continued unsettled, 
 but gradually quieted down as the whites regained ascen- 
 dency. They seem to have passionately shut their eyes to 
 all consideration of growth in industrial or commercial 
 advancement, and to have retarded their own interests for 
 ten or fifteen years to accomplish that one point. It is in- 
 comprehensible to us of the North; yet so it stands. 
 
 Meanwhile new dangers were threatening the country. 
 The colossal development of moneyed interests during and 
 since the war had bred an intense spirit not only of enter- 
 prise but of speculation throughout the North. Railroad 
 building and all forms of manufacturing and of com- 
 merce were feverishly active. " Money " was plentiful, for 
 paper-mills and the Government printing-presses turned 
 out " greenbacks " bearing the name of the Dollar but 
 passing for very much less than the golden reality. 
 Congress, inflamed Vvith the craze of the times, was in- 
 clined to perpetuate this baseless monetary system, which 
 had brought such "prosperity;" but Grant courageously 
 vetoed the bill and gave some sensible counsel. In 1873 
 the bubble burst, in an awful collapse of financial institu- 
 tions all over the land; and the lesson was a severe one. 
 In 1875 Congress patriotically and wisely passed the Re- 
 sumption Act, to take effect Jan. i, 1879, by which the 
 Government was to go back to specie payments. The day 
 
Il8 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 after Grant signed the bill the premium on gold began to 
 diminish (/. e., greenbacks began to appreciate) and, with 
 wise management by the United States Treasury, on the 
 appointed day the premium had disappeared and the Gov- 
 ernment's promises to pay were worth their face. This was 
 not accomplished without agitation, discussion, wild theo- 
 ries, passionate debate, and organized political resistance: 
 and through it all Mr. Beecher gave his constant influence 
 by pen and tongue in favor of sound currency, and sober 
 restraint of the extravagances, public and private, engen- 
 dered by the era of speculation. 
 
 On Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 30, 1876, he made a "Cen- 
 tennial Review " of the nation's life (page 772), with a 
 philosophic consideration of the effects of the two great 
 wars of our history — the Revolution and the Civil War, 
 and especially the latter, on different portions of the coun- 
 try; and he says: — 
 
 " Instead of applying a rigorous ideal moral standard in form- 
 ing a judgment, let us ask what was to have been expected of our 
 people judged by the tendency of ordinary human nature in such 
 conditions as existed at the end of this war. We shall then be 
 able to judge whether this should be a fast day or a day of 
 thanksgiving." 
 
 He says some pretty severe things about both North 
 and South, but his general conclusions are most hopeful. 
 The special topic was the duty of good citizens in the midst 
 of the exciting contested Presidential- election dispute be- 
 tween the supporters of Hayes and of Tilden, the election 
 having been held some weeks previously, and the cries of 
 conflict over the result being then loud and furious. The 
 Republicans charged the Democrats with frauds at the 
 Southern polls, and the Democrats charged the Republi- 
 cans with fraud in the Southern counting of votes: both 
 claimed the election. 
 
 Mr. Beecher firmly declared his belief in the Republican 
 theory of this contest, but his counsel was for peaceful 
 submission of the matter to the legal authorities and an 
 Americanlike acceptance of the decision, whatever it 
 might be. 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 119 
 
 His historical illustrations and precedents were exceed- 
 ingly interesting, his patriotic confidence in American 
 institutions was reassuring, and the lofty plane of political 
 morality to which he raised the whole distressing and 
 alarming contest was inspiring to the thousands who heard 
 him and the tens of thousands who read his words. It was 
 a valuable lesson in the principles of civil liberty. 
 
 Among the interests that had leaped to enormous pros- 
 perity and consequent power during the recent years was 
 that of silver mining. To such an extent had the output of 
 that metal increased that it began to own States and legis- 
 latures, and to send its representatives and senators to Con- 
 gress. It was, properly, looked upon as an interest of great 
 value to the land, but like every other one that by monop- 
 oly gathered strength it swelled with selfishness and conceit. 
 Silver was the great American product, and the rest of the 
 land and all the nations of the earth must bow down before 
 it. The insanity of attempting to satisfy the European 
 capitalists, who had lent us gold on our bonds and enabled 
 us to put through the war, by repaying them in our depre- 
 ciated "greenbacks" had passed; and indeed, as the bonds 
 were to be paid in "coin," could not have been seriously 
 proposed to the world. But is not silver-money " coin " ? 
 And is it not peculiarly our American coin ? So the bloated 
 bondholders should be paid in silver, although the silver 
 dollar could not be exchanged for the gold dollar, even in 
 our own land. 
 
 At the crisis when this specious dishonesty was advocated 
 throughout the country, started by selfish monopolists 
 but taken up by feather-brained theorists and managing 
 politicians, Henry Ward Beecher's voice again rang out 
 in warning. His sermon on " Past Perils and the Peril of 
 To-day" (November 29, 1877) will be found at page 789, 
 fitly exposing the dangers of this " suppressed repudia- 
 tion." 
 
 In 1878 occurred at Springfield, Massachusetts, the ninth 
 annual reunion of the " Society of the Army of the Po- 
 tomac," an association of officers banded together to keep 
 green the memory of " the brave days of old," of gallant 
 
120 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 comrades gone, of friendships fused in the heat of war and 
 still sound and vibrant with the true ring; an organization 
 that has never demeaned itself by descending from the 
 plane of patriotism to that of "practical politics." Mr. 
 Beecher was invited to address the Reunion, and his speech 
 will be found at page 809. The value of the services of the 
 army in the trying times of Rebellion gave him a natural 
 point for passing to a consideration of the worth of mili- 
 tary training, and the maintenance of military organizations 
 and a regular army among a free people; and especially in 
 this country, where the liberty of discussion is at times likely 
 to degenerate into the violence of riotous reformers and dis- 
 turbances of the social order. He spoke of the sources of 
 danger in our rapidly increasing population, resources, and 
 political power, the development of machinery, the growth 
 of the means of transportation, the combinations of capital 
 and enormous concentrations of individual and corporate 
 wealth, the relations of money to politics and legislation, 
 the beginnings of the socialistic movements among the 
 working classes coincident with the extraordinary increase 
 of power among the classes who employ them. These and 
 other elements of the immediate future or, as he expressed 
 it, " the next score of years," served as his themes of dis- 
 course. 
 
 Ten years have passed since he uttered the words, and 
 the reader will find in them a prophetic portrait of our 
 American social, financial, and political condition, as ac- 
 curate as if made to-day. As General Hooker said, when 
 he was called on for a speech, following it: — 
 
 " That address was good enough to last a long time. Study its 
 lessons, and digest them. I doubt if more home truths can be 
 found in any discourse of the same length since the records of 
 this country began." 
 
 The next and last phase of Mr. Beecher's political activ- 
 ity that demands our attention is the presidential cam- 
 paign of 1884. That episode is too near, and its disputed 
 points are still too much questioned, for any one to hope 
 to make an impartial account of it which shall commend 
 itself to partisan readers of either side as fair and candid. 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 121 
 
 Yet it must be attempted, in justice to the general theme; 
 for, whether Mr. Beecher was wise or unwise in the part 
 he took is aside from our proposition, — namely, that his 
 career from beginning to end was guided by unselfish principle, 
 and was consistently that of a lover of God and of man. 
 
 Since the Reconstruction wrangle of 1865-6, eighteen 
 years had passed — more than half the life of a generation. 
 The administrations of Johnson, Grant (twice), Hayes, 
 Garfield, and Arthur had successively entered into history. 
 The Southern States were all represented in the National 
 Congress, and, since the years of Ku-Klux and Bulldozer, 
 had gone also those of the "tissue-ballot" and the skillful 
 " count " which quietly but no less effectually maintained 
 a nullification of the Reconstruction governments that had 
 given the blacks the political control. The sight of their 
 harmless voting had become little by little a familiar one, 
 and no longer aroused the old-time horror and detestation; 
 but, inevitably, intelligence ruled ignorance, and their votes 
 gave them but little power. Yet it was a wholesome thing 
 to have the rising generation at the South accustomed to 
 the idea and the fact; it was preparing for the further 
 changes that were to come. The whites were growing out 
 of their unreasoning passion; the blacks were slowly train- 
 ing for real citizenship. Their existence as men, and as 
 free industrial and political factors, was little by little rec- 
 ognized and acted upon. 
 
 The philanthropic efforts of Northern givers and teach- 
 ers were gradually regarded with less suspicion at the 
 South, and the negroes began to be taught and to learn. 
 The necessity for their labor on Southern lands grew not 
 less but greater; and by degrees they were taking their 
 places as fellow-laborers alongside of the whites — who had 
 been forced to learn the bitter lesson, "he that will not 
 work neither shall he eat." The leaven of industry was 
 permeating the entire mass of social order at the South. 
 A new generation was coming up, who had been reared 
 not in luxury but in labor. Brains among the blacks were 
 beginning to assert their power, and not only could there 
 be seen white men and negroes working side by side in 
 
122 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 the fields or at bricklaying and carpentering and other 
 trades, but colored bosses had charge of white or mixed 
 groups of laborers, and colored contractors were making 
 money and acquiring property. Common -school educa- 
 tion was making headway for both races; and even such 
 exceptional establishments as General Armstrong's Hamp- 
 ton Institute, devoted to the training of negroes and In- 
 dians, more and more won and received the kindly appre- 
 ciation of the Southern people. In a word: the imposed 
 political order having been successfully overthrown by the 
 whites, roused to fury by the insult to their fetich of white 
 supremacy, and their land "redeemed," they had subsided 
 into the condition of ordinary human beings, and the play 
 of normal elements and interests began to have its just 
 effect. As the land grew quiet its splendid natural re- 
 sources attracted enterprise and capital. Manufactures 
 began to appear and grow; crops were more varied and 
 valuable; the South began to take on new and hopeful 
 conditions. 
 
 Through all these years, however, politically, the whites 
 had been almost solidly " Democratic," simply because 
 the negroes and those who represented Reconstruction- 
 ism were solidly "Republican." All other issues were 
 "pooled" in that one. Of course it was not a healthful 
 political condition, either for the Southern communities or 
 for the nation at large; since, whatever other questions of 
 public policy were before the people — as to tariff, cur- 
 rency, bond-paying, taxation, foreign relations, or what 
 not — all, even when mentioned in the party platforms, 
 were nevertheless relegated to comparative obscurity. 
 The main question at the South was how to defeat the 
 Republican party, that had turned their communities bot- 
 tom side up; and, at the North, how to maintain in power 
 the Republican party, that had saved the Union, protected 
 the l^egro, and successfully reconstructed the Southern 
 States. It was a double case of fetich. Each section 
 honestly believed that the rule of the party it opposed 
 meant the country's ruin. 
 
 It was the less reasonable, on both sides, because the 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 123 
 
 Republican party of the Civil War had been largely com- 
 posed of the loyal men from all shades and names of 
 political partisanship — not only Whigs, but also " Union- 
 ists " and "Americans," "Abolitionists" and " Free-Soil- 
 ers," " Douglas Democrats " and " Democrats " out-and- 
 out. After the war, multitudes of these men gradually 
 dropped out of the lines of the Republican organization, as 
 the issues that had united them were passed and settled, 
 and divers side-bodies of partisanship took on various 
 names as different topics — reconstruction, greenbackism, 
 silver, tariff, with the administration of President Hayes a 
 revival of the recurrent temperance reform, etc. — came one 
 by one into view. The two main camps, however, remained 
 "Republican" and "Democratic." The Republican leaders 
 had been largely men of sound principles in financial morals 
 and philanthropic statesmanship, and this fact had justly 
 maintained their army of voters in a practical major- 
 ity. Newertheless, on other issues, the unanimity of the 
 North was dividing; the successful party had necessarily 
 attracted multitudes of shifty politicians " for revenue 
 only;" and the opposition was increasing by defections of 
 opinion. 
 
 We have spoken of the changed industrial and educa- 
 tional condition of the South ; and in several of Mr. 
 Beecher's addresses, already mentioned, will be found to 
 have been foreshadowed some new perils that lay before the 
 North and the country at large. These perhaps may all 
 be grouped under the general head of "the love of money," 
 which in its daily seen effects certainly justifies the wisdom 
 of the inspired writer who said that it was "a root of all 
 evil." 
 
 The enormous prosperity of the North under the un- 
 natural stimulus of the war-fever did undoubtedly breed 
 a " haste to be rich " that was visible in every one of the 
 evils that had to be struggled against — the craze of paper 
 money, the demand for repudiation, the debased silver 
 currency, the oppressive inequities of the war-tariff main- 
 tained through decades of peace, the swollen purse-power 
 of Goroorations. the bribery and corruption of elections 
 
124 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 and legislatures and departmental administration. On 
 every side was to be seen the immorality growing out of 
 this change in the money-getting power of the times. 
 
 Meantime, the great ship of state was forging ahead and 
 coming into these new waters, vexed by strange winds and 
 moved by currents unnoticed until they had grown potent 
 to swerve the nation's course. 
 
 One of the lines of political thought in which Mr. 
 Beecher took a marked interest, although it is not repre- 
 sented in this volume by any single address, was the ulti- 
 mate ideal of the free exchange of natural and artificial 
 products among nations; so that each one, although 
 limited in certain directions of nature or of art, might be 
 able, by trading for what it could produce, to get the bene- 
 fit of the fertile soils and brains and well-trained hands of 
 all the others. And, like many thinking men of the Re- 
 publican party, he looked regretfully upon the fact that 
 the abnormal taxes imposed upon imports during the war, 
 for the expressed purpose of raising unusual revenues, 
 were maintained, at first with apology, but growingly with 
 bold justification and finally, even with claim of merit, by 
 the Republican leaders, as giving " protection to American 
 labor" because taxing the entrance of foreign products, 
 and thus tending to keep them out. 
 
 But, aside from the general question of this excessive 
 and oppressive tax, although connected with it, many of 
 the Republicans sympathized in dreading a new trouble 
 that had within a few years advanced with giant strides. 
 They feared the demoralizing effect of the surplus revenue 
 of $100,000,000 which every year piled up in the United 
 States Treasury — a premium on fraudulent and extrava- 
 gant attempts to get it " distributed to the people again." 
 For, "the people" did not mean those who had unnec- 
 essarily paid the tax, but the shrewd or favored ones 
 who could invent ways of spending it, and furnish " chan- 
 nels" which should retain much while distributing the rest. 
 
 Star- route mail contracts, fraudulent pension claims by 
 the thousands, payment of unearned railroad - building 
 mileao-e- allowances. Indian suddIv contracts — biff and 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 125 
 
 little, the leeches were attracted from every side to fatten 
 on the Treasury surplus. 
 
 The party in power was not altogether chargeable with 
 this: it was inevitable that a so long-continued control of 
 vast revenues should breed demoralization and corrup- 
 tion in any party; both because the corrupt would seek 
 it for their own ends, and because human nature is tempt- 
 able. Men in power want to stay there; and they use the 
 means at hand. It was only by a strenuous effort of re- 
 form within the Republican party that this money-getting 
 peril could be purged out of it. That was the danger to 
 be fought. 
 
 But there was another. The utilization of official station 
 and influence for private purposes, instead of solely for 
 public ends, had become a crying evil. The spoils-theory 
 of office, which regards the places of public servants as 
 the property of the party in power; which makes it the 
 chief business of the higher officials to spend time and in- 
 fluence in providing places for their partisans; which re- 
 gards not fitness for the duties but efficiency in partisan 
 politics as the qualification for public office, was prevalent. 
 The salaries of officials thus favored by party leaders were 
 taxed to furnish means for continuing those leaders in 
 power; favoritism was seen to be advancing not only in 
 executive but even in legislative cliques, making public 
 laws for private profit in the sacred name of party, and by 
 natural degradation stepping down even from that low 
 plane to the still lower one of using the influence of offi- 
 cial station for the personal pecuniary gain of the officers 
 themselves. Thus the spoils-theory of office was inextrica- 
 bly entangled, indeed, systematically reticulated, with the 
 money-getting spirit of the time. 
 
 These evils were broadly recognized in both parties by 
 thinking men and moral teachers, but the chief illustrations 
 in the Federal service were necessarily furnished by the 
 party in power at Washington. Demoralization was not 
 seen at Washington alone, it was wide-spread. As Mr. 
 Beecher said in one of his sermons: "If you send a rogue 
 to Albany to represent you, he does represent you." It was 
 
126 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 not confined to politics alone; embezzlements, defalcations, 
 breaches of trust, showed an infection throughout the bus- 
 iness world. Yet Federal politics offered the opportunity 
 of dealing with the trouble in an organized form. The 
 question arose: How can the wrong tendency be righted ? 
 The "ins" naturally said, "It is a mere matter of position; 
 if the 'outs' ever get in they will do the same." And thus 
 there arose within the Republican party a strong movement 
 to commit the party, by its declaration of principles and by 
 the presidential candidate it should offer as its representa- 
 tive, to a marked divergence from, the recognized extremes 
 towards which the current of the times, running in well- 
 worn and insensibly deepening channels, had borne the 
 responsible government. A reform of the tariff inequali- 
 ties and infelicities, a reform of the theory and practice of 
 the appointment to positions in the civil service: these 
 were the two points that many Republicans hoped to see 
 gained in the public commitments of the party. And they 
 had the more hope, because in response to the demand of 
 public opinion something had been begun. A committee, 
 appointed by a Republican Congress, had publicly examined 
 the tariff by the aid of expert witnesses from all parts of 
 the country, and had recommended a considerable reduc- 
 tion of the import taxes. True, the Congress did not find 
 it practicable to unite all interests sufficiently to effect the 
 committee's recommendation, but the public demand had 
 been recognized and the reform might be brought about. 
 The civil service movement was in like hopeful but doubt- 
 ful condition. The reform had been so urgently demanded 
 by public opinion that laws had been passed to compass 
 that end; but practically the spirit of the law was not in 
 favor among the influential leaders of the party in power; 
 and the "outs" of course, as always, had the "ins" as their 
 ever-present text of moral discourse. 
 
 The Republican Convention, of June, 1884, made fair 
 enough promises on the critical points of public policy. 
 The main thing, then^ was the probability of reform as 
 embodied in the Presidential, candidate. Mr. James G. 
 Blaine, the candidate named by the Convention, was not 
 
POLITICAL . CAREER. 1 2 ^ 
 
 accepted by those members of the party who had been 
 publicly identified with the movements for reform as sat- 
 isfactory to their convictions of what the party and the 
 country needed. 
 
 The Democratic party held its convention about a month 
 later, in July; and while its platform, like the other, con- 
 sisted largely in denunciations of the opposing party, its 
 declarations on the subject of tariff reform and the civil 
 service, honest money, restrictions of the power of corpo- 
 rations, etc., were much the same as those of the Repub- 
 licans. Both parties in their declarations recognized the 
 popular cry for reform, but both kept a wary eye on the 
 influence of vested interests. 
 
 So that the question in this case as in the other became 
 a personal one: — Who and what will be their candidate? 
 The man they nominated, Grover Cleveland, a reputable 
 lawyer of Buffalo, New York, had won his way by a pecul- 
 iarly honest and honorable and single-hearted devotion to 
 his public duties, from the shrievalty of his county to the 
 position of mayor of the city of Buffalo; and from that to 
 the station of governor of the great State of New York. 
 He was known as "the reform Governor;" as such he had 
 been elected, and as such he had admirably filled the place. 
 His creed and practice seemed to be summed up in his 
 own felicitous phrase; "Public office is a public trust." 
 
 Mr. Cleveland was accepted by his own party (although 
 the worst elements of it, typified by Tammany Hall of 
 New York, urgently opposed his nomination, and, as many 
 believe, worked against his election); and his record made 
 him acceptable to the Independent Republicans, who, not 
 seeing present encouragement for reform within their 
 party, stepped outside of it as their best hope. They 
 believed that even a temporary loss of power would be 
 better for the Republican party than the feared continu- 
 ance in the discredited methods. 
 
 Mr. Beecher was one of these. He was now an old man 
 — seventy-one years of age; but his eye was undimmed 
 (it is a curious fact that to the day of his death he never 
 needed the aid of glasses, for private or public reading) and 
 
128 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 tiis natural force of eloquence, though ripened, mellowed, 
 softened, was not abated. He went into the campaign, 
 not in his old-time tremendous fashion, for the issues were 
 aot those of human slavery and the rights of man ; but at 
 the same time he took his position unmistakably, and 
 with power. 
 
 The party fetich, however, was the most potent influ- 
 ence evoked by the Republicans. The campaign was one 
 of unparalleled personal bitterness and cruel vilification, 
 which need not be recalled. This, with the childish dread 
 of many, that, if the Republican party was thrown out of 
 power, the country would fly to dismemberment, its indus- 
 tries be sapped, its trade ruined, its commerce wrecked ; 
 and that if the Democratic party should come in, the 
 negroes would all be remanded to slavery, the rebel debt 
 paid, the pensions to Union soldiers disallowed, free trade 
 immediately inaugurated, and all the forces of the infernal 
 regions incontinently set loose, did much to check the 
 reform-within-the-party feeling that had resulted in the 
 Independent Republican schism. 
 
 Plymouth Church had never been trained by Mr. 
 Beecher to accept him as pope. He had ruled there by 
 the law of love; the authority conferred by his position he 
 never exercised, but his influence was very powerful; his 
 opinions were often combated by his parishioners, and he 
 encouraged them to speak their minds. This had been one 
 secret of the solidarity of that great membership of two 
 thousand, in matters concerning him and his wishes. It 
 was essentially a Congregational — that is, a democratic — 
 community. On the question of breaking off, even tem- 
 porarily and for any reason, from the Republican party, a 
 large number of the members rebelled against Mr. Beecher's 
 position, and when he took active part in the campaign 
 were vehemently excited, opposing him not only in private 
 but in public, and some even, as in 1866, with bitterness. 
 
 Yet he, firm in the consciousness of right motives, 
 stood strong in the conviction of his opinions. Knowing 
 well that this great land was never made and would never 
 be unmade by any political party; seeing the issues of the 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 1 29 
 
 day practically narrowed to that of a choice between two 
 men — one of whom he believed to be the likelier to influ- 
 ence a carrying out of the promises made by both parties; 
 feeling that it would be more wholesome for the country 
 at large, and even for the Republican party itself, to have a 
 shifting of powers and responsibilities — a "change for the 
 sake of change;" and, with it all, urgently desirous to see 
 a closing of the old war-soreS; and a chance for the recon- 
 structed South to share freely in administering the govern- 
 ment of a common country, and the introduction of new 
 issues which should split up the voters of the South on 
 some other lines than the old and irritating ones of 
 "Rebels " and "Republicans," — he stood sturdily where he 
 had placed himself. He made a few speeches, basing his 
 arguments chiefly on the tendencies of the times and the 
 comparative relations of the personal qualities of the can- 
 didates to those tendencies ; and his influence was very 
 great, especially among the young men of his own city 
 and the business men of the great metropolis, who had for 
 so many years seen him on the noble and manly side of 
 every great controversy of the past. When it was all 
 over, and the Republican party had lost the election, one 
 of the most brilliant and effective Republican workers in 
 Plymouth Church said: " It cut me to the soul that he 
 was so wrong; but when it comes to denying his influ- 
 ence, that is simply absurd. We never worked so hard in 
 our lives as W'C did to counteract him in this thing; but 
 the effect of his personality and his power was evident oru 
 every side." 
 
 In November, 1884, on Thanksgiving Day, two weeks 
 after the elections were closed, he preached in Plymouth 
 Church a discourse entitled "Retrospect and Prospect" 
 (page 825), taking, as was his custom for that national 
 festival, the land we live in, as his theme. 
 
 The general discourse is a review of the growth of the 
 land in the blessings of liberty; the war and its conse- 
 quences are briefly touched upon, and then he generously 
 commends the wisdom shown by the political leaders when 
 the war was past and on the people was rolled the difficult 
 
13° HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 duty of reconstructing, without experiment or precedent, 
 the shattered fragments of the sixteen Southern States. 
 The commendation is "generous," because it recognizes 
 the value of a course which at the time he opposed in 
 certain of its notable features. Among other things he 
 says : — 
 
 " The work was inherently difficult ; and I think that while 
 those to whose hands it was committed were not free from mis- 
 takes, yet they have builded well ; and their names are part and 
 parcel of American history. . . . There were great difficul- 
 ties ; human nature would not be what human nature is if there 
 had not been. There were many imprudent things done. North 
 and South. Nevertheless, we have waited patiently and coura- 
 geously until time should help ; for time is God's minister of 
 mercy. . . . 
 
 " Then we have had patience given us, too, to redeem, on 
 our side, the swollen values of the distempering war. We have 
 had grace and conscience given us to redeem our finances and 
 to bring back honestly within their bounds the issues of cur- 
 rency, and have settled business on normal and solid founda- 
 tions. . . . 
 
 " But one thing more was needed, and that was to chase the 
 scowl from the Southern brow ; to revive the old friendship ; to 
 clasp hands again in a vow of loving and patriotic zeal. It was 
 given to us last, because it is the greatest of God's gifts. . . . 
 
 " From the bottom of my soul, I believe in the honor and 
 integrity of thoughtful Southern men ; and when I get from them 
 such letters as I do, and hear from their lips such declarations as 
 I hear, that they feel at last that they are in and of the Union, as 
 much as we, and point to the flag, declaring, with tears, ' That is 
 now my flag,' I believe it; I should be faithless to God and to 
 providence if I did not. 
 
 "Not the least joyful element in this reconciliation is the 
 assured safety and benefit which will accrue to the colored race. 
 That has come to pass which was their only safety. Just as 
 soon as the Southern statesmen accept the perfect restoration of 
 themselves to the great body politic, and find that there is no 
 division as between Northern men and Southern men in any of 
 the honors of government ; just as soon as they are in, and a 
 part of every administration, as, thank God, they will be ; just so 
 300n of necessity that will take place which is the salvation of 
 the colored race. As long as they were a fringe upon a Northern 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 131 
 
 party, the South was condensed and solidified against it. As 
 soon as they are divided at home between the administrational 
 party and the opposition party, they will be guarded and talien 
 care of. ... I regard this now, with schools and academies 
 and various seminaries spread among them, as the final step of 
 emancipation. 
 
 "It is in these views, which have not been accepted with sym- 
 pathy by some of the dearest friends I have, that I have acted 
 ! in the recent campaign] ; and in the calmest retrospect I now re- 
 joice that I was able to act so. 
 
 " The greatest mistake of my life has happened twice, as I have 
 been informed. I propose this morning now to read a portion 
 of the letters that were the first "greatest mistake of my life." 
 That was immediately after the war, in the autumn of 1866. 
 
 " I read it now that you may see how straight a line has run, 
 from the very days of the war down to this hour, in my thought, 
 philosophy, and action." 
 
 Mr. Beecher then read portions of his two Cleveland 
 letters of 1866, on the Reconstruction of the Southern States 
 (page 736), showing his view that, not by imposition from 
 without but only by the natural development of mutual 
 and common interests between the two races — "the long 
 result of time" — could white and black be brought to live 
 and work harmoniously together. And he concluded 
 thus: — 
 
 " 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. . . . And I have read these letters, 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 mo- 
 ment ; 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 immedi- 
 ate 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." 
 
[32 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 Mr. Beecher's wisdom, in all the eventful passages of 
 tiis life, will probably always find men of his own genera- 
 tion to question it; because they thought, and doubtless still 
 think, differently. But the clear-eyed honesty of his con- 
 dctions; the utter lack of self-consideration or ambition, 
 or any unworthy motive; the broad consistency and gen- 
 eral sagacity of his views, based on the laws of God as 
 wrought out in human nature — whether displayed in per- 
 sonal or social or political developments; and his single- 
 ness of mind and devotion to his principles, — cannot be 
 candidly denied or doubted. Those qualities were the 
 source of his long-continued and extraordinary influence 
 in the political life of his time. And there are multitudes 
 who can now look back and see how history has justified 
 him in withstanding the current political passions of his 
 day — as to slavery, compromise, disunion, peace and war, 
 the mutual relations of blacks and whites at the South, 
 repudiation and national credit, sound and debased cur- 
 rency, the peaceful settlement of contested elections, and 
 numberless other matters, wherein his counsel had always 
 been freely given. He thought about everything in the 
 light of God's truth and man's benefit, and withheld noth- 
 ing of his thought, but courageously spoke it out and 
 stood to it. 
 
 How far he was right and how far wrong in his hopes 
 and aims of 1884, to see the present perils of the land 
 guarded against by a change, even if temporary, of the 
 party in power and under responsibility, only the future 
 can tell. We who are yet in the turmoil of the contest are 
 too near to judge. He did live to see the substantial 
 assurance of every other great principle that he had worked 
 for; but the latest issue arose too near the end of his life. 
 Yet experience had taught him patience; and patience, 
 hope; and, although he died without the sight, his faith 
 was strong in the self -cleansing and recuperative power of 
 the American people, and in God's guiding hand. The 
 contest over " Prohibition " is already dividing the colored 
 vote in the far South between the two parties. As their 
 manufacturing interests grow, the opposing cries of "Pro- 
 
POLITICAL CAREER. 133 
 
 tection" and "Revenue Tariif " will bring in another split- 
 ting wedge. And thus, in spite of remnants of barbarism 
 like the "Glenn bill" of Georgia, making it a crime to edu- 
 cate white and negro children together, and other evidences 
 of the stubborn race-prejudice (which shows at the North 
 as really as at the South), the great revolution is on the 
 march, and will not go backward. His faith in that regard 
 will be justified and his large wisdom will be recognized. 
 
 The final address given in this volume is Mr. Beecher's 
 "Eulogy of Grant" (page 840), which was delivered in 
 Tremont Temple, Boston, October 22, 1885, about two 
 months after the death of that great man. It is dignified, 
 strong, impressive, containing noble tributes to the hero 
 and eloquently enforced lessons from the history in which 
 he bore so large a part. 
 
 In one of his addresses is a paragraph concerning Grant, 
 which may well be placed here at the close of this imper- 
 fect review of Mr. Beecher's political career, a fit summary 
 of his own future memory on earth: — 
 
 "As I recede, along the adjoining fields of Jersey, from the 
 great city, I speedily lose sight of the masts, of the warehouses, 
 and of the spires themselves ; and yet, when I have gone so far 
 that the last glimmer of these things is lost, the towers of the 
 Brooklyn Bridge stand full and high in the air, conspicuous. As 
 time goes on we shall forget that which called down such a storm 
 of fury upon his name; and when all incidental and collateral 
 things have gone below the horizon, his name and just fame will 
 stand towering high in the air, unobscured and imperishable ! " 
 
134 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 VI. 
 
 STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS. 
 
 One of the aptest things said about Mr. Beecher since 
 his death occurs in an article published in the Christian 
 Union, by Dr. R. W. Raymond, who had known him inti- 
 mately for many years. Writing of h is peculiar^ sjucerity 
 of character, Dr. Raymond says: — 
 
 " Certainly, I never met another man who was so entirely the 
 same in public and in private. ... It is often said, by those 
 who fancy themselves critics, that he was a great actor. In the 
 most important sense this is not only not true, it is the exact op- 
 posite of truth. He could not dissemble. He could not give 
 force of expression to a feeling which was not with equal force 
 dominant for the time within him." 
 
 This trait is the complement of the one noted in our 
 first chapter (page ii) as the ch2ef_el gment of. thp mf^n'?^ 
 life — his sensitiveness ^ to trufh^ To prevaricate, to give a 
 shitty, double^iensed answer, was something that in forty 
 years of acquaintance and twenty of close personal, lit- 
 erary, and business association with him, as his publisher, 
 I never knew him to do: nor do I believe it was possible 
 for him.* He could be silent; no man more utterly so. 
 And at times, when pursued by questions that he. did not 
 wish to answer, he would pass into silence, not only, but 
 an impassibility of countenance that gave no more sign 
 of understanding or of response than the face qf the 
 Sphinx. When he spoke at all, in public or in private, he 
 spoke the truth, as it was given to him to see the truth. 
 
 * In this chapter it will occasionally be simpler and more fitting for the 
 writer to speak in his own person, as the material is, to some extent, in the 
 nature of personal testimony. 
 
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS. 135 
 
 This was so characteristic that it could be seen through- 
 out his life — in every element and phase. It is the ex- 
 planation of many puzzling things. When Bismarck 
 first appeared in European diplomacy, he baffled all the 
 trained diplomats of the day by the simple device of 
 speaking the truth, for they, never supposing that any 
 man in power would plainly disclose his real intentions, 
 calculated on the opposite, or on some variation, and 
 deceived themselves. It is in much the same way that 
 Henry Ward Beecher — not from shrewd forecast, but by 
 natural impulse and determinate principle a truth-lover 
 and truth-speaker — has been an enigma to many, who, see- 
 ing a man pre-eminent in so many other directions, have 
 judged his truthfulness, at times, not by his own sincere 
 utterances, but by their observations of average humanity. 
 
 And yet no one of them will say that he was otherwise 
 on the level of ordinary men. They will recognize his 
 greatness of intellect, of imagination, of heart, of physical 
 power, and of that indefinable but very positive gift which 
 they call eloquence, and which is a resultant of all the 
 other gifts; yet so weak is their faith that they cannot 
 conceive of a man having all this and the crowning graces 
 of moral and spiritual steadfastness besides. What, how- 
 ever, was the realm in which he lived and moved, and to 
 which he devoted all his strength ? What was the one 
 thing that underlay his every utterance ? It was the eleva- 
 tion of human life above the physical and temporal, to the higher 
 plane of the moral and spiritual; and the testimony of many 
 who knew his daily "walk and conversation," in matters 
 both small and great, is that he was to a rare degree 
 one who practiced what he preached. Except in certain 
 noted matters wherein his own interests were deeply in- 
 volved, his sincerity was never doubted; yet just there is 
 where he should receive the benefit of "good character." 
 For when to the aim of fifty years of effort, open and 
 known to all men, is added the central, unmistakable char- 
 acteristic of truthfulness, it stands to reason that the words 
 of such a man are to be received as realities. 
 
 In fact, his words were realities, to him, in a sense far 
 
136 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 more actual than most men can comprehend. So instan- 
 taneous and forcible were his processes of thought, so 
 thorough were his convictions, so vivid were the concep- 
 tions of his mind and the analogies and similes with which 
 his imagination flashed them upon the perception of his 
 hearers, that they took place in him as experiences, rather 
 than as the mere results of intellection. When he was pre- 
 paring for a public occasion he avoided any clear formula- 
 tion of his material until the time was almost at hand, be- 
 cause it was so difficult for him to follow a second time 
 over a line of thought once taken. If I may repeat a por- 
 tion of what I contributed to a chapter of Reminiscences 
 in Abbott and Halliday's " Life " of him, a remark he made 
 just previous to beginning his third series of " Yale Lect- 
 ures on Preaching " will be apt, here. The series was to 
 be on " Methods of Using Christian Doctrines," and the 
 day before he was to go to New Haven I asked him: "Do 
 you know pretty nearly the line of treatment you mean 
 to take ? " — for it was a difficult and critical task, and he 
 dreaded it. 
 
 "Yes; in a way," he answered. "I know what I am 
 going to aim at, but of course I don't get down to any- 
 thing specific. I brood it, and ponder it, and dream over 
 it, and pick up information about one point and another, 
 but if ever I think I see the plan opening up to me I don't 
 dare to look at it or put it down on paper. If I once 
 write a thing out, it is almost impossible for me to kindle 
 up to it again. I never dare, nowadays, to write out a ser- 
 mon during the week; that is sure to kill it. I have to 
 think around and about it, get it generally ready, and then 
 fuse it when the time comes.'' 
 
 This every one knew who was familiar with the diffi- 
 culty he always had in correcting for the press what 
 he had spoken, when it had been reported and put in type; 
 and even what he had written. The matter under revis- 
 ion was no longer in process of making, to be perfected 
 and corrected, but was a thing done, and had become an 
 outside fact, simply suggestive of new ideas. The orig- 
 inal production ran great risk of being overrun with new 
 
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS. 137 
 
 growth; every joint pushed forth a fresh bud of vital ex- 
 pansion. Hence, he rarely undertook to see his speeches 
 or lectures or sermons after their delivery, until they came 
 to him printed and published. 
 
 Nor was this the case with his public utterances alone. 
 The thought that arose, if not suppressed altogether, was 
 apt to find instant and forceful expression. He was quite 
 as likely to burst out into splendid eloquence amid a small 
 group of chatting friends, or even to a single listener, as 
 before a vast audience, — not Macaulay-like, in artificial 
 fireworks, but with the spontaneity and friendly glow of a 
 great mass of cannel coal at the home fireside. 
 
 He was moved by his own inner forces. One would as 
 soon suspect the Atlantic of holding back a particularly 
 grand roll of surf at Long Branch until people should come 
 down to see it, as to imagine Mr. Beecher " keeping " a 
 fine thought or a striking figure till he had an audience. 
 It was not that he despised careful preparation for public 
 speech, since his whole life was a constant gathering, — a 
 patient, painstaking, studious reading of books, and of 
 men, individually and socially; a storing of his mind with 
 multitudinous information and the results of other men's 
 thought and discovery. But all this entered into his own 
 mind and became an indivisible part of himself; and 
 when, in talk or in conversation or in public speech, an 
 idea came up for expression, it laid hold of him with 
 power, as a real thing; and it was this, together with his 
 natural gifts and cultivated modes of utterance, that made 
 such strong impression on others. 
 
 It is important to have this fact, of the native and habit- 
 ual outspeaking sincerity of the man, thoroughly stated; 
 for on it stands his life. And by way of emphasizing what 
 I have called the "reality" of his thoughts, to himself, it will 
 perhaps be worth while to claim and restate here another 
 personal reminiscence, which I have several times seen in 
 print, although I never put it there. 
 
 It was at the close of one of his patriotic Thanksgiving 
 Day sermons that, after raising his hearers with him to a 
 noble elevation of thought and sentiment, he closed with 
 
138 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 an apostrophe to Liberty, whose radiant face and form he 
 described in dazzling eloquence. A day or two later I 
 chanced to be where he was, in a family circle, and as he 
 was weary he had thrown himself down on the sofa. We 
 were speaking of a report of the sermon in one of the 
 papers: "But," said he, "how stupid of the reporter to 
 make that a A\a.va.onA-studded scepter ! It was a diamond 
 scepter — one flashing crystal." 
 
 " Now, Mr. Beecher, that's not likely. Whoever knew of 
 such a thing ? Besides, the phonographer probably wrote 
 just what he heard, and it is my recollection that you said 
 ' diamond-studded.' " 
 
 With one bound he was on his feet. " I don't know 
 what I said, but I know what I saw." And then with ear- 
 nestness and increasing intensity as he was rekindled by 
 the remembrance, which seemed to have been an unusually 
 vivid one, he went on and told how it came about, what 
 had been the foregoing thought, and how, suddenly, the 
 vision shone upon him, and what it was. From that time 
 I never doubted that he did actually see — that his imagina- 
 tion did really " body forth " — the forms of things unknown, 
 and of known things not present to the bodily eye. 
 
 There is another such reminiscence, — not so poetical 
 or striking as to the vision, but perhaps even more to the 
 point under discussion. 
 
 In another of his sermons on Thanksgiving Day Mr. 
 Beecher was describing an imaginary interview between a 
 ship-owner of kindly Christian feeling and an old sailor 
 Dn one of his ships in port, which the merchant had 
 gone to look at. He indicated the superior's frank and 
 friendly way of speaking, and then the old sailor raised 
 tiimself slowly up from his work to reply. Mr. Beecher 
 never used tobacco; I doubt if he ever tasted it; but, 
 in the person of the old sailor, he rolled his tongue 
 iround in his cheek, put up his hand, and, to clear his 
 moiith for talking, unmistakably made the movement 
 oi taking out of it a large cud, and went on with his 
 reply. The conversation proceeded for perhaps a min- 
 ute. Mr. Beecher's right hand meanwhile had dropped 
 
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS. 139 
 
 to his side, but it was closed, as if holding something. 
 When finally he spoke of the merchant pleasantly offering 
 his right hand to say good-by, the sailor's closed right hand 
 furtively threw away something behind him, was wiped off on 
 the back of his trousers, and then held out to receive the gen- 
 tleman's farewell. I had watched the hand, believing that 
 the orator all the while unconsciously felt the " moist un- 
 pleasant body " of the sailor's cud, and was proportion- 
 ately amused to see him throw it away and wipe his hand 
 sailor-fashion before taking the other's proffered palm. The 
 experience was a reality to the man who was describing it. 
 
 When I afterwards asked Mr. Beecher about it he was 
 immensely tickled with the comicality of the thing, but had 
 no recollection of the minor details at all. What he was 
 after was the illustration of his subject; the special mode 
 of doing it was something he gave no thought to. And, 
 indeed, the action was so quiet and unnoticeable that it 
 could not have been an intentional part of the picture, and 
 I doubt if it was seen by the audience at all. 
 
 But, it may be objected, this is not moral sincerity. No; 
 yet it shows the native temper and habit of the mind, 
 which has much to do with moral developments of every 
 kind. And that tendency, to speak the things that were 
 himself, may be found — nay, it is one of the most obvious 
 qualities noticeable — in all his multifarious teachings. Says 
 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes: — * 
 
 " The way a man handles his egoisms is a test of his mastery 
 over an audience or a class of readers. What we want to know- 
 about the person who is to counsel or lead us is, just what he is, 
 and nobody can tell us so well as he himself. . . . Mr. Beecher 
 has the simple frankness of a man who feels himself to be per- 
 fectly sound, in bodily, mental, and moral structure ; and his 
 self-revelation is a thousand times nobler than the assumed im- 
 personality which is a common trick with cunning speakers who 
 never forget their own interests. Thus it is that wherever Mr. 
 Beecher goes, everybody feels, after he has addressed them once 
 or twice, that they know him well, almost as if they had always 
 known him ; and there is not a man in the land who has such a 
 multitude who look upon him as their brother." 
 
 *"The Minister Plenipotentiary," page 422. 
 
I40 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 In the " Beecher-Memorial " volume, compiled and pub- 
 lished by Mr. Edward W. Bok, among other interesting 
 contemporary tributes to Mr. Beecher's qualities, is one 
 from Dr. William A. Hammond. Referring to Mr. Beech- 
 er's speech at the dinner given to Herbert Spencer when 
 in New York, he says; — 
 
 " I shall never forget the effect which his ringing words pro- 
 duced upon an audience, composed as it was, of hard-headed men 
 who were not accustomed to be swayed by their emotions. They 
 rose to their feet, waved their table-napkins, and shouted them- 
 selves hoarse, not because they all approved the views which he 
 then revealed to them, but because of the astounding courage, 
 the wonderful regard for the truth as he understood it, and the 
 almost superhuman honesty by which he must have been act- 
 uated." 
 
 It was this very sincerity of self-revelation, and the 
 further fact that there was a self worthy to be revealed, 
 that was his strength. To quote Dr. Storrs again: "His 
 power has been so constant and so vast only because the 
 sources of it have been so manifold and so deep." 
 
 This same outspeaking fashion of his, however, was also 
 a source of weakness, in that it sometimes led him into 
 headlong leaps of feeling and overstrenuous or inaccurate 
 statements. In his address to the New York and Brooklyn 
 Association of Ministers and Churches, October ii, 1882, 
 when he resigned his connection with that body in order 
 that neither the Association nor any of its members should 
 feel oppressed by the sense of any responsibility for his 
 religious teachings, he said: — 
 
 " 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-thou- 
 sandth degree to those more happy men who never make a mis- 
 take 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 in the heavens ; and it is 
 of necessity that such a nature should at times give such intensity 
 to parts of doctrine as to exaggerate them when you come to 
 bring them into connection with a more rounded and balanced 
 
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS. 141 
 
 view. I know it. I know it as well as you do. I would not do 
 this 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 could never think in the study, and 
 when I have feelings that are so far different from any that be- 
 long to the lower or normal condition that I can neither 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 apprehend what Paul said, — that he heard things 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 crys- 
 talline nor thoroughly guarded views. There is often an error on 
 this side and on that ; but I cannot stop to correct them. . . . 
 The average and general influence of a man's teaching will be 
 more mighty than any single misconception, or misapprehension 
 through misconception. 
 
 The Association would seem to have agreed with that 
 final assertion, for after the long and full statement of his 
 beliefs and teachings, which he proceeded to make, they 
 passed without a dissenting voice a resolution, recognizing 
 his magnanimity in wishing to relieve his fellows in the 
 Association of even apparent responsibility, but declaring 
 that his exposition of doctrinal views " indicates the pro- 
 priety of his continued membership in this or any other 
 Congregational Association," requestihg him to withdraw 
 his resignation, and finally saying: — 
 
 " We desire to place on record, as the result of a long and 
 intimate acquaintance with Mr. Beecher, 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 Chris- 
 tian minister." 
 
 Our point here, however, is that whether in public 
 or in private, whether in quiet moods, or under the stimu- 
 lus of a keen interest, or on the sweep and swing of a 
 mighty wave of feeling, he was always natural, always 
 himself, always giving forth his own interior condition, 
 honestly and frankly; and those who knew him longest 
 came by experience to know the truthfulness of his words. 
 
142 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 This is especially noticeable in his letters, whether to 
 friends, acquaintances, or strangers. With a strong sense 
 upon him of an unwillingness to read manuscript and an 
 impatience of pen-work, he was nevertheless a voluminous 
 correspondent, and wrote innumerable letters, notes, scraps 
 of memoranda, questions, answers, instructions, — every 
 conceivable size and style of epistolary communication to 
 all sorts and conditions of men. A collection of his letters 
 would be a mountain of ore-veins, with many a bonanza- 
 chimney of pure precious metal; sense and trifling non- 
 sense, fun and broad-based wisdom, affectionate and poetic 
 sentiment, tender sympathy in trouble, the noblest spirit- 
 uality — the man himself. Mr. Joseph Howard, Jr., in his 
 graphic and characteristic " Life" of Mr. Beecher, says; — 
 
 " Years hence, when the ultimate biographer and collector shall 
 have received from all sources, at home and abroad, the multitu- 
 dinous trifles which go to make the comprehensive whole, far 
 from the least of these illustrations of the greatness and goodness, 
 the weakness and the uniqueness of Mr. Beecher's character will 
 be found in letters, sent here and there, dashed off with the 
 rapidity of friendly utterance, or penned with care and thought 
 as to their effect. . . . Elsewhere in this volume will be found 
 letters written during a period of forty years to his most intimate 
 friends. . . . They are packed with sentiment. They give 
 evidence of his extraordinary and peculiar vocabulary, and are 
 brightly garlanded with choice illustrations drawn from the 
 heavens, from the earth, from the verdure-clad fields, from the 
 golden granaries of the West, from the heart of society, from the 
 progress of art and science, from everything which human nature 
 teaches, showing that it was his constant habit so to think and 
 so to write. . . . His letters are no more like those written 
 by ordinary men than he was like ordinary men." 
 
 The circle that furnished the letters to which Mr. How- 
 ard alludes could doubtless furnish many more, and so 
 could every group of heart-friends that in his long and 
 loving life Mr. Beecher drew to himself; so, too, could 
 lawyers, statesmen, politicians, business associates, ecclesi- 
 astical friends (and opponents), editors, young men that 
 he helped, strangers who addressed him, — there was no 
 limit to the varieties of humanity to whom he wrote, for 
 
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS. 143 
 
 one reason and another. And the " infinite riches" of his 
 nature could be gathered from these writings quite as 
 effectively, if not as completely, as from his public minis- 
 trations. They are all characteristically frank; and while 
 naturally his exuberant sentiment and affection found most 
 outplay towards his nearest friends, many a distant corre- 
 spondent has been surprised and delighted to get so much 
 more of the man himself in a felicitous mood than had 
 been hoped, when addressing him. 
 
 In tracing the trait of sincerity in Mr. Beecher's charac- 
 ter, there is one point more that requires mention: his 
 trustfulness in friendship. In his " Eulogy of Grant,'' the 
 orator says: — 
 
 " Such was his loyalty to friendship that it must be set down 
 as a fault — a fault rarely found among public men." 
 
 This remark may be applied to Mr. Beecher himself, — 
 except that the evils flowing from his loyal belief in friends 
 never led him into errors of principle whereby the interests 
 of the public suffered. He himself took the chief injury. 
 It is true, there were occasions when his confidence in the 
 disinterestedness and judgment of some friends resulted 
 in unjust conclusions bearing upon others; but they were 
 candid mistakes, amid complicated currents, at times when 
 he felt the need of experienced and unbiased counsel and 
 believed that he had found it. When an idea took posses- 
 sion of him he held it tenaciously, and in the face of oppo- 
 sition would sometimes forward it with tremendous force 
 (under pressure of that human faculty which he himself 
 has happily described somewhere as a "conceited con- 
 science"). Yet he was not a stubborn man; and when 
 fairly convinced of error he was no laggard in acknowl- 
 edging it. A patent fact in his career was that in the 
 realm of personal friendship his powerful affection for 
 others — and especially for any whom he could help — drew 
 him into confidence in the sincere love for him of those 
 whom he loved. The honest strength of his own feeling 
 sometimes blurred his sight, when the feelings of others 
 towards him were to be discriminated. It sprang from 
 his own open and sincere nature. The special instances 
 
144 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 of this trait which plunged him into the deep and awful 
 trouble of his life need no specification here. They are 
 but too well known. 
 
 It presents an . anomaly; yet the fact stands: Mr. 
 Beecher's knowledge and intuitions of human nature as 
 shown in his published works would seem to be almost un- 
 rivaled, since the day of the master-dramatist who stands 
 above comparison; while yet his judgment in the cases of 
 actual persons was at times egregiously wrong. 
 
 His remarkable knowledge of man's nature was based on 
 incessant observation and study of men's actions and mo- 
 tives, the results of which were shot through with the light 
 of his marvelous imagination and warmed into life by his 
 human sympathy, enabling him to vitally realize what must 
 be the consciousness of others — to think their thoughts, 
 and feel their sensations, and be moved by their emotions. 
 But there was a force in him greater than knowledge, 
 loftier than imagination, more potent than generic human 
 sympathy: it was the constant outreaching of an affec- 
 tionate heart for personal friendship. Freely he received, 
 throughout his life; for who could resist or ignore the 
 friendliness of so rich, so noble a nature ? And, as he re- 
 ceived, so and much more freely did he give, bounteously, 
 unreservedly. Nothing pleased him so much as the power 
 to please or serve a friend, — unless it was a chance to do a 
 good turn for an enemy. 
 
 Yet it is not to be supposed that he gave his friendship 
 without just cause. Among the thousands who felt his per- 
 sonal influence and who bore to him an enduring personal 
 affection, the members of Plymouth Church showed that 
 their friendship was of the lasting kind, while of those who 
 at one time and another became intimate with him, the 
 element of constancy was lacking in but a pitiful few. 
 The roll would be seen to contain many noble and honored 
 names, with others quite as worthy if less known. He was 
 attracted by beautiful and generous qualities, and instinct- 
 ively repelled by low and mean ones. Of the two false 
 friends who raised the cloud of suspicion that cast so black 
 a shadow on his life, one had been a youth of noble promise 
 
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS. 145 
 
 who had grown to maturity under his fostering kindness 
 and loving care, and who in early manhood showed many 
 winning and admirable qualities; while the other, frank and 
 attractive in demeanor, intelligent and interesting in con- 
 versation, came to him in an hour of desperation, professing 
 indeed to be moved by loyalty to his opponent, but winning 
 his confidence by free protestations of belief in him, and 
 offers to undertake the generous office of "mutual friend." 
 Complaint has been made concerning Mr. Beecher, that 
 he had the "royal trait" of accepting not only homage but 
 service and sacrifice, as no more than his due, and that he 
 was negligent of homely obligations. This is true; but it 
 is only half the truth. A man of many and important 
 functions, he was under large responsibilities, which needed 
 both service and sacrifice from many helpers. In the great 
 Congregational Council of February, 1876, — the largest in 
 the history of the denomination, — which assembled to con- 
 sider (and resulted in practically sustaining) the propriety 
 of the rules and practice of the disciplinary polity of Plym- 
 outh Church, the fact was brought out that the member- 
 ship of that church was something over two thousand 
 five hundred; and that when the whole church work was 
 considered, its parish of families, its own immense Sunday- 
 school, its Bethel and Mayflower Mission schools, etc., it 
 was seen to be the center of from 12,000 to 15,000 persons, 
 looking to it for instruction, for consolation, for moral di- 
 rection. That would be enough for almost any man to 
 carry on his soul. Yet Mr. Beecher's duties, as a sort of 
 central heart to supply and circulate spiritual life-blood, 
 were not limited by these thousands, although their needs 
 were the nearest and the most conscious. There were 
 demands upon him from every side — his neighborhood, 
 his city, his friends, various literary and business enter- 
 prises, political questions and questioners, public lect- 
 ures in all parts of the land, and other things that will 
 suggest themselves to those who knew his life; not to 
 mention the army of the poor, the sick, the afflicted, the 
 unfortunate, the importunate, the inconsiderate, the asi- 
 nine, with all of whom and of which his patience was tire- 
 
146 HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 
 
 less and his activity endless, for good. True, as he once 
 said to a hostile audience delaying him in his speech, "We 
 have all the time there is;" but even that did not suffice 
 for the calls upon him; he had to work largely through 
 others. And as all who worked with him and under him 
 felt his inspiration, they gladly gave him service and sac- 
 rifice; and he, unconsciously, but most naturally and cor- 
 rectly, identifying himself with his work, did doubtless 
 accept this as no more than his due. 
 
 There were times when this went too far; when — espe- 
 cially under the influence of others who, more facile than 
 he in the special matters under consideration, changed the 
 relative focus of things in his sight — he failed to appre- 
 ciate the position and just rights of some of these co- 
 laborers with him. Yet as one who knew much of his way 
 for many years, I wish to record my belief — arrived at not 
 by impulse or through mere personal affection — that he 
 was never consciously unjust, but that on the contrary he 
 would far rather suffer than inflict injury. During twenty 
 years of intimate work with him, while there were often 
 passages of perplexity and even severe trials of the rela- 
 tions between us, I never received from him one impatient 
 or unkind word. And not only so, but I think it safe to 
 say that during all those years I never heard from him an 
 irritable or harsh expression about other people (except in 
 that playful extravagance which robbed it of its sting), 
 even concerning those who were most unfaithful and ven- 
 omous toward him. 
 
 He was not perfect; and he would have been the first to 
 laugh at such a claim for him. His intentness on one 
 thing would often cause him to forget another thing which 
 people were justly expecting; he was unmethodical, and 
 hard to work with because he could not be counted upon 
 as a sure element at the time needed; his modes of work 
 increasingly depended upon his moods of spirit and of 
 body; he moved over so large a field and was a part of so 
 many groups and interests and movements that some of 
 them at times suffered sorely: yet, he did his best. Per- 
 haps he undertook too much. 
 
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS. 147 
 
 Hiswe^ak point was always his sympathetic nature as 
 regarded persons. His courage never failed, except when 
 it wasTiecesSary to do something that would displease or 
 grieve or afiflict a friend; and then he was cowardly — there 
 is no other word for it. Sometimes in church affairs, some- 
 times in business matters, a certain line of action would 
 be decided on in consultation which would displace or 
 disappoint some one for whom he had a strong af- 
 fection, even perhaps on whom he had especially leaned; 
 and if it was arranged that he should convey the decis- 
 ion to the knowledge of the party interested, he would 
 postpone . it, avoid it from day to day — until at length 
 the crisis was at hand, and he either left the circumstance 
 to make itself known, or took refuge from the personal 
 complication in a stern setting forth of the necessities 
 that had compelled the decision. That this was a kind of 
 moral cowardice, no candid friend of his can deny. In 
 several instances it resulted in the keenest distress and in- 
 dignation on the part of the friend whom he could not 
 bear to wound, but who was, even thereby, the more 
 sorely bruised. 
 
 It was somewhat the same in cases of bereavement, 
 although less so because he was not in any way responsi- 
 ble for the personal suffering. He would shrink like a 
 girl from announcing to a friend the death of a dear one; 
 yet, even in the most painful circumstances, when the duty 
 was brought before him of comforting the afflicted at the 
 time of burial, he quietly and strongly grasped the situa- 
 tion, and the power of his uplifting spirit was wonderful. 
 Perhaps it was because the very publicity of such occasions 
 divested them somewhat of the personal element, and 
 brought them upon that ideal or generic plane of human 
 nature, which was so familiar to his ken, and his subtle 
 sympathy with which, on the other hand, made individ- 
 uals so responsive to his touch. 
 
 There certainly seems to have been some such un- 
 derlying cause for the coupling of his almost unfailing 
 knowledge, wisdom, and courage, when things were to 
 be considered on the broad ground of general principles, 
 
[48 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 with his occasional lack of poise and correct character- 
 reading where individual friends were concerned. The 
 latter, however, although a marked defect, was at worst a 
 weakness, not a vice. It arose from his excess of what in 
 due proportion is a very noble quality — that of personal 
 sympathy; a quality which gave tone and color to his 
 sntire life, which led him into nearly all his troubles, but 
 which on the other hand was the element of that outspeak- 
 ing self which, as Dr. Holmes says, drew such multitudes 
 to " look upon him as their brother." To him as a man 
 may be applied his own description of his preaching: " Not 
 crystalline [symmetrical] nor thoroughly guarded; " with 
 "often an error on this side and on that; " but his "aver- 
 age and general influence will be more mighty than any 
 single misconception," — and that certainly was upon a 
 high plane of being, and in the direction of the purest 
 and noblest aspirations. 
 
 These characteristics of Mr. Beecher have been here 
 brought together in order to be utilized with some other 
 facts, which have never to my knowledge been so grouped 
 before, in considering briefly the one great trouble of his 
 life, which for some years markedly diminished his general 
 public influence, although the richness and power of his 
 spiritual ministrations in his church were during that 
 period as markedly increased. 
 
 It was one of the difficulties inseparable from his person 
 and place that whatever related to him had to go" into the 
 newspapers. He experienced the extreme of good and the 
 uttermost of evil that newspaper discussion can effect. 
 The slime of whispered scandal that his especial enemies 
 trailed about for some years reached the editors of all the 
 chief journals, but they had the manliness to let it alone. 
 The ecclesiastical discussions which arose when Tilton, and 
 afterward Mrs. Moulton, were " dropped from the roll " of 
 Plymouth Church, were fruitful occasions of partisanship 
 and prejudgment; and when Tilton published his final ac- 
 cusations (swollen, by repetitions and accretions, from 
 impropriety to hideous crime) the positions of the parties 
 involved made newspaper discussion inevitable. The men 
 
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS. I49 
 
 of Mr. Beecher's own profession, moved variously by 
 friendship and loyal trust in a man of hitherto spotless 
 life and reputation, and on the other hand by " envy, 
 hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness " in theologic dif- 
 ferences and personal jealousies, took sides, and made 
 another unusual element; while politics, religion, and 
 every other line along which he had made himself felt, 
 furnished friends or foes according to individual expe- 
 riences of his help or his hindrance in their former 
 doings. In short, the simple question of Henry Ward 
 Beecher's personal innocence or guilt of what was charged 
 against him had no fair field for settlement. 
 
 His church — a body of men and women who certainly 
 had the keenest interest possible in knowing the true 
 character of the man under whose influence they and their 
 children were living, and containing a multitude who had 
 never hesitated to oppose him and, if they could, to vote him 
 down in church affairs when they did not agree with him — 
 investigated the matter through a committee of men hon- 
 ored and trusted by the whole membership, and cleared him. 
 
 When at last the matter was brought into a court of 
 justice by a suit against him for $100,000 "damages," it 
 received as full and exhaustive an exposition as ten law- 
 yers, and a judge who gave them free range to collect and 
 bring in all possible testimony, could accomplish in a six 
 months' trial. The result was a disagreement of the jury, 
 three members of which voted finally against Mr. Beecher, 
 and nine (comprising all who were men of Christian belief) 
 for him. Without discussing the surmised or asserted rea- 
 sons for this disagreement, it is enough to say, that the ver- 
 dict of the majority, agreeing as it did with the opinion of 
 those who best knew the man, was subsequently confirmed 
 by experts in evidence whose opinions are now accessible. 
 
 The oldest and probably the most influential clergyman 
 among the Congregationalists of Great Britain is Rev. 
 Henry AUon, D.D., pastor of the Union Chapel, Islington, 
 London, and for many years editor of the British Quarterly 
 Review. His church and congregation are very large, 
 
ISO HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 wealth, and effectiveness in the community than any other 
 of the denomination, while their works of Christian charity 
 and systematic help among the poor of London offer proof 
 of their Christian orthodoxy. Dr. Allon is not an emotion- 
 al man, like his friend and Mr. Beecher's friend, Dr. Joseph 
 Parker, the great preacher of the City Temple; he is rather 
 of the more exact, intellectual type, a man of scholarly cult- 
 ure, a preacher and writer of polished vigor, of a forcible 
 yet chastened eloquence. For years before they had met, 
 Dr. Allon had been a reader and admirer of Mr. Beecher's 
 sermons (which, by the way, have been published in *The 
 Christian World of London, one every week, since January, 
 1861, without a single omission, to the present time, and 
 still continue). In 1863 the men met, and from that time a 
 firm friendship had bound them. When in 1869 the first 
 volume of the " Plymouth Pulpit " sermons was issued in 
 book-form. Dr. Allon spoke of them as follows: — 
 
 "These corrected sermons of perhaps the greatest of living 
 preachers — a man whose heart is as warm and catholic as his 
 abilities are great — combine fidelity and scriptural truth, great 
 power, glorious imagination, fervid rhetoric, and vigorous reason- 
 ing, with intense human sympathy and robust common-sense." 
 
 When this trouble arose Dr. Allon was, naturally, in- 
 tensely moved; and, while believing loyally in the character 
 of his accused friend, was like many others puzzled by the 
 days of silence and by the complications of the whole affair. 
 
 When finally the civil trial came on, Dr. Allon called to 
 him several of his most trusted parishioners, some of them 
 eminent in the profession of the law, and agreed with them 
 that he and they should, each by himself, read scrupu- 
 lously every part of the case as it proceeded — speeches, 
 testimony, documents, summings up, charges, all — and get 
 as accurate a knowledge of the whole as professional 
 weighers of evidence could who did not see and hear the 
 witnesses. When it was concluded, and the muddled jury 
 rendered no verdict, this "struck jury" of experts came 
 together and, without discussion, gave their individual 
 ballots; the result being unanimous in the opinion that 
 
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS. 151 
 
 But again: the editor of the Law Journal (Albany, N.Y.) 
 is Mr. Irving Browne. In an article on Mr. Beecher's 
 death in the issue of March 19, 1887, after referring to Mr. 
 Beecher's " excessive impulsiveness and guilelessness," 
 which he regarded as " the secret of the great scandal," 
 he says: — 
 
 " We recorded our convictions about this unhappy affair at the 
 time, and should not now refer to it except to repeat the opinion 
 of the leading counsel for the plaintiff [Tilton], the late William 
 A. Beach. Mr. Beach was predisposed to believe Beecher guilty, 
 but after the trial he declared in our hearing that he believed him 
 innocent, and that his appearance and utterance when he asserted 
 his innocence on the witness-stand were the most sublime and 
 overpowering exhibition of the majesty of human nature that he 
 ever beheld. He could not understand how any one could resist 
 that solemn avowal. ' I felt, and feel now,' said he, ' that we were 
 a pack of hounds trying in vain to drag down a noble lion.' " 
 
 In the issue of April 30th, referring to some question that 
 had been raised as to the correctness of his memory of Mr. 
 Beach's remarkable statement, Mr. Browne says: — 
 
 " The remarks which we quoted were addressed by Mr. Beach 
 to the Hon. Martin I. Townsend and ourselves, and we see in an ' 
 ' interview ' with Mr. Townsend, published in a Troy newspaper, 
 that he confirms our recollection of Mr. Beach's assertion that he 
 believed Mr. Beecher innocent. Mr. Beach said other things 
 which rendered it impossible that we should be mistaken as to 
 his opinion. Mr. Beach, Mr. Townsend, and ourselves were old 
 acquaintances, fellow-townsmen, near neighbors, and practiced at 
 the Troy bar together for many years. . . . We do not see 
 that Mr. Beach's 'integrity' is in the least involved. He simply 
 went on after Mr. Beecher's testimony, and made the best he 
 could of a poor case, and even his greatest admirers admitted that 
 his argument was weak, half-hearted, and unequal to his reputa- 
 tion." 
 
 And later in the same issue he adds: — 
 
 " Since writing the above we have seen the Troy Times of 
 April 2Sth, which, in speaking of our report of Mr. Beach's opin- 
 ion, says : ' It finds confirmation and support from acquaintances 
 of the late Mr. Beach in this locality. A resident of Lansing- 
 burgh says : " Mr. Beach had old friends and companions here. 
 He declared to them his belief in the innocence of Beecher. He 
 
152 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 said to one of them : ' I had not been four days in the trial before 
 I was confident that he was innocent.' And he adhered years 
 after the trial to the opinion. It seems that it is worth while to 
 record the fact that Beach said so, freely and positively, as I am 
 told by one of the men to-day." ' A correspondent also writes 
 from Lansingburgh to the Times in the same issue : ' It is a fact 
 that Mr. Beach, in the frankness of his intimacy with gentlemen 
 in this village, stated that he formed, and then, when he spoke, 
 long after the trial, held the opinion that Mr. Beecher was an in- 
 nocent man, and that the trial of Tilton v. Beecher established that 
 conviction in his mind.' " 
 
 A verdict in favor of the defendant, from the leading 
 counsel of the plaintiff, contrary to his original belief 
 when he entered the case, and established by the trial it- 
 self, ought to be enough to satisfy any really reasonable 
 mind. 
 
 If more were needed, it rnight be found in the subse- 
 quent friendliness of most of the others of the plaintiff's 
 counsel shown for the defendant in after years; and espe- 
 cially by the fact that Chief Justice Neilson, who presided 
 at the trial and had formerly not known Mr. Beecher, was 
 ever after his fast friend. And when, in the Brooklyn 
 Academy of Music (in 1883, eight years after the trial), 
 the fellow-citizens of the venerable clergyman assembled 
 to celebrate his seventieth birthday with testimonials of 
 respect and affection such as no other man has ever re- 
 ceived from them. Justice Neilson presided at the open- 
 ing of the meeting. 
 
 It is true that many hold themselves in doubt concern- 
 ing this sad yet triumphant passage in Mr. Beecher's life, 
 although they have never done what all the above-men- 
 tioned experts did, and conscientiously made themselves 
 masters of all the facts and testimony bearing upon it. 
 They content themselves by saying, " Upon that question 
 the tribunal of history may render a clearer judgment than 
 this generation has reached." Happy those — and in this 
 case the multitude is increasing — who do not need a forty 
 years' pilgrimage through the wilderness of collateral 
 prejudice to find the straight and simple path out of this 
 mystery! 
 
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS. 153 
 
 The characteristics of Henry Ward Beecher which form 
 the theme of this chapter are an inseparable part of his 
 political career, as that was a natural outgrowth and es- 
 sential portion of his whole life. The very elements that 
 gave his intellectual qualities such a unique power in 
 the church and the world — his love of truth, his sincerity, 
 his frank self-revelation, his sympathy, his remarkable 
 emotive force — were what led him into the shadow of his 
 great trouble, but, inspired by his singular realization of 
 the indwelling of the spirit of God in the soul of man, they 
 also led him through the darkness into the light beyond. 
 No one can comprehend the fact that he was sustained un- 
 der that crushing weight for years, and steadily, cheer- 
 fully, and with power continued his work, showing more 
 of the wealth of his great nature than ' ever before, who 
 does not accept the idea that he was a pure-souled. Chris- 
 tian man, who loved his kind and absolutely trusted 
 the God he professed to serve. No other theory will 
 account for it. His sermons from 1873 to 1876 are the 
 richest and strongest that he ever preached. It was in 
 1872-3-4, in the most trying time of the trouble, that he 
 was invited to give three courses of " Lectures on Preach- 
 ing " at the Divinity School of Yale College, in the 
 " Lyman Beecher Lectureship " founded by his friend 
 Henry W. Sage; and those three series of lectures, on the 
 " Personal Elements," " Social and Religious Machinery," 
 and "Christian Doctrines," stand as perhaps the most 
 valuable of all his contributions to the education and in- 
 spiration of his time. 
 
 His general popularity at that period of course suffered 
 a severe reversion. His books, his paper, his public lectures, 
 were not wanted, and business troubles were added to his 
 burden — a burden the heavier for him, that others had to 
 suffer in consequence. There was but little wanting to his 
 pain; yet the love of loyal friends and his unfaltering trust 
 in a Father God were enough to keep his mind serene and 
 his spirit sweet and steadfast in kindness. 
 
 In 1876 he began public lecturing again. Major J. B. 
 Pond, who was his companion on all his lecturing tours 
 
154 HENRY WARD BEECHEK. 
 
 from that time, says in the preface to " A Summer in 
 England with Henry Ward Beecher": — 
 
 " Excepting only Arizona and New Mexico, there was not a 
 State or Territory in the Union in which we had not traveled to- 
 gether. In sunshine and in storm ; by night, by day, by every 
 conceivable mode of travel ; on steamboats and rowboats ; by 
 stage, and on the backs of mules, I had journeyed at his side. I 
 was near him in the days of 1876-8, the time of his deepest sor- 
 row, when he was reviled and spit upon ; I saw the majestic 
 courage with which he passed through gaping crowds at railroad 
 stations, and at the entrances of hotels and public halls, — a cour- 
 age which I had not conceived mere humanity could possess. . . , 
 
 " Especially during those three darkest years was he the sub- 
 ject of my sad admiration. Often have I seen him on our enter- 
 ing a strange town hooted at by the swarming crowd, and greeted 
 with indecent salutations. On such occasions he would pass on, 
 seemingly unmoved, to his hotel, and remain there until the hour 
 for his public appearance ; then, confronted by great throngs, he 
 would lift up his voice, always for humanity and godliness. . . 
 . . . . And when he had spoken, the assemblages would 
 linger to draw near to and greet the man whom they had so 
 lately despised. How changed I have often seen the public atti- 
 tude toward him when he left a town into which he had come 
 but the day before ! . . . 
 
 " I thank God that it was my privilege to attend his fortunes 
 to the end, and to see and hear on both sides of the continent, 
 and on both sides of the ocean, demonstrations of love and con- 
 fidence that came at length in so unsullied and vast a stream, 
 from the church, his friends, his country, and his race, toward 
 him who had brought so many thousands of them so much 
 nearer than they had been to the common Master of us all." 
 
 Several of the discourses in this volume, of 1876, 1877, 
 and 1878, show how he again laid hold on public questions; 
 and as the years went by his great power was gradually 
 re-confirmed, — -those who oftenest saw and heard hirn 
 being his staunchest supporters. 
 
 And thus, little by little, slowly but steadily, his sun 
 rose once more, through the clouds and mists, until it 
 rode high in the heavens, shining with a full and noble 
 sffulgence. 
 
CONCLUSION. 155 
 
 VII. 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 Henry Ward Beecher was so large a personality, so 
 multifarious a nature, that hundreds of writers have not 
 only since his death but also during his life attempted to 
 depict him, without accomplishing more than showing, 
 each one, the phase that he himself had been able to appre- 
 ciate. The pictures are mostly truthful, but all are partial. 
 Fortunately, the theme of these chapters is not the man 
 but only a single line of his activity, and we are dispensed 
 from even the attempt to present a complete view. 
 
 It is true, in trying to find some of the more potent fac- 
 tors in his political life and influence, we have been obliged 
 to consider his principal native qualities and the condi- 
 tions of their growth and cultivation; because his political 
 activity was not an artificial addition to his regular labors, 
 but a spontaneous outgrowth of himself, and an integral 
 part of his life-work. It illustrates the man. When one 
 comprehends his acts and motives there, it is easier to see 
 the unity and beauty of his entire life. His enthusiastic and 
 unwavering love for God and for man gave him an access 
 to spiritual forces and to an answering sympathy from 
 men's hearts, that kept his power upon them vital to the 
 last. His keen perception and industry and assimilative 
 capacity provided an endless store of knowledge; and 
 when, drawing from this " things new and old," he rea- 
 soned with men, and illumined good sense with the bright- 
 ness of wit, with poetic attractiveness, and with the enno- 
 bling beauty of the moral and the spiritual, his hearers 
 had confidence in his wisdom. 
 
156 HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 This was to be seen wherever he appeared, and espe- 
 ci^-lly among men of his own piK)fession, who, however 
 /much they may have assumed him to be deficient in 
 their peculiar modes of reasoning, never failed to look up 
 to him for inspiration or be glad to get his help when his 
 powerful personality was present. A distinguished au- 
 thority has spoken of seeing him " in councils and deliber- 
 ative assemblies where, when the business became intricate 
 and entangled, and things were greatly mixed, there came 
 in his clear, incisive sagacity, his persuasive eloquence, 
 and his resolute will, and pulled things straight with mar- 
 velous suddenness." 
 
 His inborn honesty and candor were evident in his im- 
 pulsive habit. Rev. Lyman Abbott, D. D., in an article in 
 his paper, the Christian Union, makes a statement the truth 
 and aptitude of which are so striking that I wish to cite it, 
 and bear personal witness to its correctness. It refers to 
 the goodness as one source of the greatness of Mr. 
 Beecher: — 
 
 " He was a great preacher because he was a great and good 
 man. He was pure as a pure woman ; simple as a little child ; 
 frank to a fault. His most intimate friends never heard from his 
 lips a suggestion of a salacious jest ; I never knew the man bold 
 enough to venture on one in his presence. He was incapable of 
 deceit or artifice. He could conceal, when concealment was nec- 
 essary, only by maintaining an absolutely impenetrable reserve. 
 The charges of duplicity and falsehood which a foul conspiracy 
 brought against him some years ago, were to all who knew him 
 as intellectually absurd as they were morally monstrous.'' 
 
 This native and habitual sincerity, and his sturdy inde- 
 pendence of opinion, strengthening him to stand always 
 foremost among the battlers of right against wrong — even 
 when his personal affiliations and sympathies acted to 
 deter him from differences with those whom he loved — 
 gained and kept for him the respect of mankind. His very 
 opponents — unless small-souled enough to be utterly 
 blinded by passion, either of personal or partisan preju- 
 dice — conceded to him a remarkable honesty in opinion 
 and in action. And in those characteristics — faith, knowl- 
 
CONCLUSION. 157 
 
 edge, sagacity, sincerity, and independence — lay the rea- 
 sons for his influence upon the political life of this nation, 
 an influence unparalleled and unequaled by that of any 
 other unofficial American citizen in the history of the land. 
 When the length of his career is considered, and the 
 breadth of it — whether as to the number of individuals 
 affected or the variety of interests involved — his life will 
 be seen to have been an inseparable and mighty element 
 in that of the nation. 
 
 Dr. W. S. Searle, for many years Mr. Beecher's physician, 
 writes in an article in the North American Review: " His- 
 tory records no man who outranked his fellows in more 
 directions, and to a greater extent, and who fell below the 
 average in fewer elements and developments of mind and 
 soul." That is certainly a truthful, unexaggerated state- 
 ment, put in a form not easy to deny. And while it finds 
 illustration in every portion of Mr. Beecher's life, it stands 
 especially substantiated in his political career. His public 
 life, represented only by a few salient points in these 
 thirty-two " Patriotic Addresses," covered actively a full 
 half-century. What other name stands for so prolonged, 
 so full, so steady a power; for so few mistakes and so 
 many notable successes; for such unvaried pressure on the 
 side of moral right, of spiritual elevation, of a loyal trust 
 in God and a generous trust of man ? 
 
 His influence on the religious life of his generation was 
 of course greater than his political power, because it was to 
 the former especially that he devoted himself, even while la- 
 boring in politics, reform, or the lighter realm of literary en- 
 tertainment. This can be here only alluded to. In 1869 a 
 newspaper noticing an early volume of " Plymouth Pulpit" 
 asserted that his influence on religious thought was greater 
 than that of all the theological seminaries put together. 
 This friendly exaggeration, however, contained a truth; 
 his teachings permeated the atmosphere and were felt 
 wherever young men, earnest to think and to learn, were 
 studying religious problems. Mr. George S. Merriam, in 
 the Christian Union, in an article of Beecher reminis- 
 cences of the time when Mr. Merriam was Mr. Beech- 
 
IS 8 HENRY WARD B EEC HER. 
 
 er's managing editor of that paper, apropos of an allusion 
 to Plato, says: " While not naming him, of course, with 
 Plato for originality, he was essentially of Plato's type in 
 his interpretation of the universe by a lofty impassioned 
 idealism; and the serene light of the Athenian sage kindled 
 in the Christian preacher into a warmer and tenderer 
 glow." This, however, is complemented by another trait 
 no less influential, which perhaps is best set forth in a pas- 
 sage from one of" Mr. Beecher's own sermons, entitled 
 " Fact and Fancy: '' — 
 
 " It has been said that everybody is either a Platonist or an 
 Aristotelian — Plato standing for ideal philosophy and Aristotle 
 for the real and practical. Everybody tends, it is said, to follow 
 one or the other. No ; the perfect man unites them both, and is 
 at once Aristotelian and Platonist. His feet standing on solid 
 fact, his head goes philosophizing, and his heart keeps the balance 
 between them." 
 
 Dr. Abbott, again, noting the departure of the present 
 time towards a less formal and a more practical and eth- 
 ical religion than formerly, says that "in this great move- 
 ment Mr. Beecher has been the leader. His relation to it 
 is acknowledged of all men." " He has rendered his 
 generation many and great services — moral, political, so- 
 cial, theological; but his greatest service is in this^ that 
 he has taught the Puritan Church, that God is love." 
 
 His sermons and lecture-room talks have been for more 
 than twenty-five years published and widely read in En- 
 gland, and many a man high in ecclesiastical honors there, 
 as well as numberless students and young clergymen who 
 loved and followed his teachings, have expressed their 
 gratitude to him for the light he has shed on their path. 
 Dr. Howson, the Dean of Chester, and joint author with 
 Conybeare of the scholarly and famous " Life of St. Paul," 
 ;ame to Plymouth Church to see the man and hear the 
 i^oice whose printed words had been so much to him. He 
 went home with Mr. Beecher, and they had a delightful 
 :ime together; and on his return to England he sent one 
 Df his own books in return for one Mr. Beecher had given 
 lim, inscribed, " For gold I give thee brass." 
 
CONCLUSION. 159 
 
 Dr. Joseph Parker, the eloquent London preacher, his 
 unswerving friend for twenty-three years, writes: — 
 
 " As a preacher I believe the whole pulpit of the world would 
 give him the palm. When Charles Kingsley heard him he sat and 
 wept like a child through the whole discourse, and when it was 
 concluded he said : ' Mr. Beecher has said the very things I have 
 been trying to say ever since I entered the Christian pulpit.' 
 The Dean of Canterbury said to Mr. Beecher himself : ' There is 
 one thing, Mr. Beecher, for which we must all thank you, and 
 that is for what you have taught us respecting the Fatherhood of 
 God.' When he went [in 1886] through England and Scotland he 
 was hailed on every side by ministers who bore the most grateful 
 testimony to the happy influence which his ministry had exer- 
 cised upon their spiritual life." 
 
 And this kind of evidence could be multiplied indefi- 
 nitely. If he was through all those long years thus influ- 
 encing the teachers of religion, and opening to their souls 
 an entrance into the " lofty and impassioned idealism " in 
 which his own spirit so largely dwelt, how incalculable 
 his influence upon the millions who hear and read the 
 teachings of these thousands of instructors ! Truly he 
 was a mighty man; and the marvel is that his might was 
 so unselfishly exercised for the right. 
 
 In his last notable contribution to religious teaching — 
 his sermons on " Evolution and Religion " — he simply gave 
 deliberate utterance to a line of thought which he had been 
 following, at first vaguely, afterwards with more clearness 
 and certainty, for many years. In his preface he says: — 
 
 " The universal physical fact of evolution, which a widely ac- 
 cepted philosophy of our day postulates as a theory of the Divine 
 method of creation, is one which so naturally and simply fits 
 many a puzzling lock, that it is gratefully seized by many who 
 seem to themselves to have been shut out from hope and from 
 the truth. 
 
 " For myself, while finding no need of changing my idea of the 
 Divine personality because of new light upon His mode of work- 
 ing, I have hailed the Evolutionary philosophy with joy. . . . 
 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 develop- 
 ments of God's providence in this His world, I fervently believe." 
 
l6o HENRY WARD BEECHER. 
 
 In a private letter (1885) he writes: " It is the fruit of 
 my life's thinking, and has come not from books but from 
 the life of my own soul." It was a vital and helpful belief 
 to him; and, whatever may be its fate as a basis of men's 
 religious conceptions, he used it with power to help and 
 vitalize the dying faith of many a man who received it with 
 gratitude, and made it possible for many a preacher and 
 teacher to read the signs of the times in scientific thought 
 — not as a hindrance, but as a new inspiration, in the in- 
 terpretation of God's revelation in his word and in his 
 works. 
 
 Of the addresses in this volume it is not too much to say 
 that they constitute a glowing picture of the times that 
 gave them birth. Their statem ents, often violently disputed 
 when first set forth, have hardened into accepted truth; and 
 their matter and style — for terseness, clearness of reason- 
 ing, aptitude of illustration, keenness of wit, power of ap- 
 peal, and all the elements of effective eloquence — will 
 stand among the most enduring monuments of the orator's 
 genius. 
 
 In many a passage his words now stand as prophecy ful- 
 filled. 
 
 Lincoln, Grant, and Beecher are generally acknowledged 
 to have been the three greatest men developed by the co- 
 lossal contests of their era. Yet it is worthy of note, that 
 both the civil hero and the military hero of the War owed 
 their high eminence largely to the vast power of a Nation, 
 entrusted to their able hands in official responsibility, 
 while the power exerted by Henry Ward Beecher was sim- 
 ply that of his own individuality. His great church, his 
 extensive effect upon the religious thought and teaching of 
 his time, his wide journalistic influence, his popularity as 
 a lecturer, his general acceptability as the man to voice the 
 public feeling on all sorts of occasions, his political influ- 
 ence at home, his triumphant changing of the course of a 
 stubborn nation abroad, his eminence in so many spheres 
 of activity during so long a life, — these all grew out of the 
 magnificent forces of the man himself. 
 
CONCLUSION. i6l 
 
 And the man himself, therefore, is what the volume of 
 " Patriotic Addresses," in spite of its limited scope, will 
 help to show. 
 
 Descriptions and biographies of him are but partial side- 
 lights. Real knowledge of him can be had only from his 
 own utterances, where the living flame of his genius burns 
 imperishably. He held no office ; he bore no professional 
 label ; he wore no sectarian badge or party collar ; he was 
 neither President, nor General, nor Doctor of Divinity; 
 but above all rank, beyond all title, stands and will stand, 
 the unadorned, yet unforgotten, name of Henry Ward 
 Beecher. 
 
a (Breat Morft Completed). 
 
 THE LIFE OF JESUS, THE CHRIST. 
 
 By Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 Completed Edition, Vol. I entire, and Vol. II to end of Chap- 
 ter XXV, stand as Mr. Beecher finished them. Chapters XXVI 
 to XXXII, concluding the second volume, have been carefully 
 compiled f rom-'the Author*s Sermons along the line of the topics in- 
 volved, by his son, Wm. C. Beecher and Rev. Samuel Scoville. 
 
 Issued in two vols., 8vo; richly illustrated with steel and wood engrav- 
 ings and three Maps. Cloth, $5.50; library style, $7.50; half morocco, 
 $9.50. Volumes separately, for those who wish to complete old sets: 
 Cloth, $3.00 ; library style, $4.00 ; half morocco, $5.00. (Parties who have 
 Vol. II in good condition and would like to have the two volumes in new 
 and identical binding, are invited to correspond with the undersigned.) 
 
 Fragments of Opinion when Vol. I "was issued. 
 
 The ordinary overflowing exuber- 
 ance of his style, its manifold illus- 
 trations, its boldness and occasional 
 homeliness, its perpetual play of wit 
 and sarcasm, are here abated; the 
 marvelous majesty and beauty of the 
 person of J esus have had an elevating 
 and chastenmg power. The result 
 is a dignity almost uniformly sus- 
 tained, and now and then passages 
 of exquisite hea.uty.'^—Pres6j>£erzan 
 Quarterly and Princeto7i Review. 
 
 *'The great poet-preacher of our 
 day has prepared for the Church a 
 marvelous gallery of pictures. . . . 
 No one can easily lay aside the book 
 when once he commences its perusal 
 until he has completed the last page; 
 and all will anxiously await the pub- 
 lication of the concluding volume." — 
 Christian Advocate^ New York. 
 
 " In the best qualities of historical 
 composition, in bold grouping, strong 
 delineation, clear narrative, the book 
 is all that could be asked for; and the 
 constant recurrence of metaphors and 
 illustrations from the natural world 
 has a singular appropriateness and 
 beauty in the story of one who 
 so constantly taught by like meth- 
 ods." — Boston Daily Advertiser^ 
 Mass. 
 
 " We perpetually feel the author's 
 master-power as he darts forth a con- 
 densed argument in a single illustra- 
 tion. This quality makes the work 
 eminently suggestive, and every min- 
 ister, teacher, parent and thmking 
 person will find it of great conse- 
 quence to keep by him for frequent 
 reference and use." — New York 
 Standard. 
 
 *** Soid by all Booksellers, or mailed, on receipt of the price, by 
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 *' Compels the reader^s attention, and leaves upon his mind impressions 
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 " Graphic and entertaining . . . as rich in incident as any romance, 
 
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 Henry Ward Beecher: His Personality, Career and Influ- 
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 traits. 8vo. , 164 pp. Cloth, 75 cents. 
 
 " Altogether the finest bit of biographic work that has been done in 
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 "Gives a well-proportioned view of Beecher*s whole career, and is 
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 mulated by Mr. Howard during his forty years of intimate friendship and 
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 Bismarck: His Authentic Biography. By George Hezekiel. 
 Historical Introduction by Bayard Taylor. Profusely 
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 *' Noteworthy for the fullness of its details and the great variety of 
 
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 eled. $2.50."" 
 " A bookj the charm of which it is not easy to express. . . . This 
 
 admirably judicious record of a wholly and singularly beautiful, strong, 
 
 vise, consecrated life." — Chicago Adz'ance. 
 
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 ANONYMOUS. A Palace-Prison; or, the Past and the 
 Present. Sanity Amid the Insane. $1.00. 
 
 HENRY WARD BEECHER. Norwood: a Tale of Village 
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 " You have written a great book 
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 " I have read it with intense inter- 
 est."— U. S. Senator Wm. P. Frye. 
 
 "It should be read by everjrone 
 who is not fulhr satisfied with things 
 as they are. It would be fortunate 
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 upon thousands." — Hugh O. Pente- 
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 " Judge Tourgee has struck many 
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 FooVs Errand will not equal in 
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 " No tangle of plot, but a keen and 
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 *** Sold by all Booksellers, or mailed, on receipt of the price, by 
 
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" A brainy lilt's volume " — Providence Telegram. 
 
 MIDNIGHT TALKS 
 Ht tbe Club. 
 
 Reported by AMOS K. FISKE. 
 
 Contents: T/ie * ^ Owl Party f^ Temperance; The Skepherd- 
 less Sheep; Sunday Observance; Religion; Political Immorality; 
 Superstition and Worship; The Scriptures as a Fetich; Irish- 
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 of Human Evidence; Power of Personality; Discussions Ap- 
 plied; Usefulness of Delusion; The Faith Defended; Tolera- 
 tion and Enlightenment; Comfort in Essential Truths. 
 
 *' A delightful book. . . . Cov- 
 ering a multitude of subjects with a 
 kindly light of wit and wisdom." — 
 Jno. Boyle O'Reilly, Boston. 
 
 "The opinions are those of a 
 broad-minded, earnest man of to- 
 day, an optimist of the better sort, 
 and they are written in crisp and 
 cogent style." — Providence Journal. 
 
 "The 'Owl Party' of four who 
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 Express. 
 
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 thoughtful. ' *" — Sa n Fra ncisco Chron- 
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 letin^ Philadelphia. 
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 ful humor lies beaming on the sur- 
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 light and consolation to many 
 doubting minds." — New York 
 Times. 
 
 " Although the subjects are not 
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 their treatment which gives an im- 
 pression of novelty, and one feels 
 the inspiration of a certain breadth 
 and liberality of thought which is 
 uncommon in discussions of this 
 sort." — Boston Post. 
 
 " This candor of mind, and a cer- 
 tain sweetness of temper are very 
 alluring to the reader, who, whether 
 he finds his own pet beliefs con- 
 firmed or gently taken apart, and 
 their incongruities made clear, will 
 enjoy every step of the process." — 
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 "Read with pleasure and laid 
 aside with regret when the last 
 page is reached." — Boston Satur- 
 day Evening Gazette. 
 
 " Keen insight, clear discernment, 
 strong convictions, and distinct in- 
 dividuality of thought. . . . At- 
 tractive to those who wish to be 
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 16mo, Vellum Cloth, gilt top, ^l.OO. 
 
 FORDS, HOWARD, & HULBERT, 
 
 30 T.afayetfe Place, New York. 
 
Hn Hmple IRecor^. 
 
 A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 By Wm. C. Beecher and Rev. Samuel Scoville, 
 ASSISTED BY Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 This standard work, known generally as "The Family Biog- 
 raphy," to distinguish it from the many hasty and ephemeral 
 compilations sold as giving the ' ' life" of Mr. Beecher, has in- 
 trinsic merits which are more and more recognized as it takes its 
 permanent place. It gives ample details of Mr. Beecher's child- 
 hood, youth and early manhood; copious extracts from his char- 
 acteristic diaries, and graphic portrayals of his experiences and 
 conflicts as a preacher of Christ and a champion of liberty. Every 
 page possesses a fascination growing out of the subject. The 
 tribulations and sorrows of the great preacher are not passed over 
 lightly, as many advised, but are calmly and sorrowfully set forth 
 in clear perspective, as befits an impartial history. 
 
 One vol., large 8vo, 713 pp. With fine steel engraving of H 
 W. Beecher, and copious index. Cloth, $3.00; sheep, $3.50; 
 red seal, $3.75; half morocco, $4.50; full morocco, $6. 
 
 " Will always be the best personal 
 biography of Mr. Beecher— the one 
 which contains the most of his own 
 personality. . . . The editors have 
 wisely kept themselves in the back- 
 ground, and making use of the au- 
 t >bioecaphical material which Mr. 
 Beecher left in the form of letters 
 and in personal reminiscences scat, 
 tered through his writings, they 
 have woven together a narrative of 
 which Mr. Beecner may be truly said 
 to be himself the author."— Cftr/j- 
 ttan Union. 
 
 " Every word in this book has 
 
 been read by us with the deepest in- 
 terest. ... A narrative in which 
 truthfulness is patent in every line. 
 . . . We heartily commend the 
 reading of this book to those who 
 desire to obtain an inside as well as 
 an outside view of Mr. Beecher's 
 Hie."— Pulpit Treasuyy, N. V. 
 
 " Rich in its collection of facts, it 
 bears evidence of singular industry 
 and devotion on the part of its com- 
 pilers. . . On the whole the 
 book IS one of remarkable interest, 
 and vi^iU, we think, grow in public 
 favor. -North American Review 
 
 *** Sold by all Booksellers, or mailed, on receipt of the price, by 
 
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